


When the World Tears Apart

by Apikale



Category: Milo Murphy's Law
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Realities, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cancer, Depression, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, I promise it gets better, M/M, Marriage, Mild Language, Time Travel, fanfic of a fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2018-12-25 21:45:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12044916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apikale/pseuds/Apikale
Summary: After losing Dakota, Cavendish tries to move on, even though half of his universe seems to have shattered.  Little does he know where the other half went.





	1. Loss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sinclaironfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinclaironfire/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Love from A to Z](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12027114) by [Sinclaironfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinclaironfire/pseuds/Sinclaironfire). 



> Based on "Love from A to Z." That fic made me sad, so I'm making it better. This story has allusions to that story as well as some of my own, so there will be some inconsistencies, but you always get paradoxes when you time travel and try to fix everything.  
> That said, sometimes you have to finish angsting before you can fix anything.  
> For best results, listen to 3 Doors Down's "Here Without You" while reading.

The worst rate for time travel was one second per second, one minute per minute, one hour per hour, one day per day.

Especially when even the years were flying by far too fast, and now they were left with only days.

Balthazar oscillated between wanting to focus intently on every last second, not letting a drop of sweet time go to waste, and wanting to take both their minds off the matter completely.  He wished he could bring Vinnie doughnuts, but Vinnie couldn’t eat anymore.  He wished he could take Vinnie to the zoo, or maybe a dance, but Vinnie couldn’t walk anymore.  He wished he could bring Ginger, the rabbit they had adopted the day after their first kiss, a few months before they started officially dating, or even “Catvendish,” that stupid feline Vinnie still swore up and down looked like Balthazar, but pets were not allowed in the cold, sterile white of the hospital.

Out of all of Vinnie’s favorite things, all Balthazar could bring was himself.

Tears streamed down his face as he held Vinnie’s hand, watching him slumber, wondering if this would be the time his partner wouldn’t wake up.  His mind drifted back to how it had all started.

It hadn’t been long ago at all.

 

 

It had seemed like the perfect day, the perfect mission, mainly because pistachios had nothing to do with it, and also because they had usurped it right out from under Brick and Savannah.  But there was no time to leave things to the senior agents; through an extraordinary turn of luck (possibly because Milo Murphy, bless his heart, was several states away studying at MIT), Vinnie and Balthazar had discerned the identity of their colleagues’ adversary, and triangulated his position, and as his scheme was to be launched in mere minutes, time was of the essence.

Wasn’t it always?

Vinnie and Balthazar had no background on Polychronos at all.  They hadn’t been briefed, after all, for a mission that wasn’t theirs.  They didn’t even know what he looked like, and when the dust had cleared, Balthazar found he still wasn’t sure he remembered.

“You’re too late!” the man had cackled, flipping a random switch as he tossed what looked sort of like a grenade in their general direction.  “Suffice it to say, I don’t recommend getting too close.  What I’ve got cooked up could be earth-splitting!”

“No!” Vinnie had objected.  He had lunged for the object, shielding it with his body.

“Damnit, you fool!” Polychronos screeched.  “You’ll absorb the entire shock!”

Vinnie grinned triumphantly at the entity’s disappointment.  “Welp, guess that means you’re foiled!”

“Vinnie!” Balthazar had called.  “We don’t know what that thing is, or what it’s going to do, this is no time to be a hero!”

“Sounds like the perfect time to be a hero if you ask me!”

And then came the flash.

The rumbling Balthazar felt in every cell of his body.

Vinnie’s cry of excruciating pain.

Polychronos’ roar of defeat.

Polychronos running away.

Vinnie standing up again, tossing the empty shell aside.

“Do be careful!”  Balthazar ran up to his partner and wrapped his arms tightly around him.  “You’re hurt!”

“Actually, not really,” Vinnie said.  His shirt was slightly singed, but there was no sign of serious damage anywhere on his body.

“Thank heavens,” Balthazar breathed.  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I feel fine,” Vinnie insisted.

 

 

He wasn’t fine, though.

About a week later, Vinnie was sick.  Fever, sore throat, nosebleeds, aches, loss of appetite.  That last one worried Balthazar the most.  But surely it was a coincidence.  People contracted influenza all the time in the early 21st century.  Most didn’t die of it.

So Balthazar did his best to keep him comfortable.  He made hot cocoa, turned on the television, just lay in bed with him a while.  Who cared if Balthazar caught whatever-it-was.  That would just mean Vinnie would have to take care of him when he was better.

But Balthazar didn’t get sick, and Vinnie didn’t get better.

Two weeks later and Vinnie was worse, constantly bedridden.  His temperature spiked to 104, far too high by any century’s standard.  With that, Balthazar knew he needed to get Vinnie to the hospital.  Antiquated as 2027’s medicine was, at least it was medicine, and it was all that was available.  Returning Vinnie to 2185 was out of the question.  Everyone knew that sick people must never enter the time stream, for their own safety and that of those around them.  There was no need to transport formerly exterminated pathogens, and certain illnesses could be severely exacerbated by exposure to time travel.  Balthazar had sent in a request for a physician from the Bureau to come tend to Vinnie, but there was no word on when they might arrive.

Meanwhile they were in the ER, running test after test.  Vinnie tried to play it cool, making jokes and smiling while they jabbed him with every kind of needle, but Balthazar wasn’t fooled.  Vinnie’s arm looked like a pincushion; on top of all of his other symptoms, that had to hurt.  Or if it didn’t, then Vinnie must be in terrible pain not to notice.  Either thought was unbearable.

 “We’ll get this sorted out,” Vinnie assured Balthazar.

“That’s what I’m supposed to be telling you!” Balthazar replied.

“Then it must be true, right?”

Balthazar sighed.  “They must have your results by now.  That will make it easier once the doctor from our time gets here.  We’ll get you home in no time.”

“Sweet, and then you have to let me pick the music station every day for a month because you still feel sorry for me, deal?”

“Deal.”  Then, looking furtively around, he whispered, “And whatever bloody mission Block sends us, we will gleefully ignore.  We have much lovemaking to catch up on.”

Vinnie smiled hopefully at that thought as he nodded off to sleep.

 

 

“Mr. Cavendish-Drowssap?”

Balthazar jerked his head up from the uncomfortable plastic hospital chair.  He hadn’t realized he’d been asleep, or that he even could sleep in such a position.  Dr. Underwood stood in the doorway of the room.

“Mr. Cavendish-Drowssap, I’m afraid I’ll have to transfer your husband.”

“So you know what’s wrong with him?”  Finally, some good news.

Or not.

“Dr. Beck has a bed prepared for him in the oncology ward.”

“Oncology?”  Balthazar felt as though he had been the one jabbed with a hundred needles.  “You mean cancer.”

Dr. Underwood nodded gravely.  “Dr. Beck is better equipped than I to discuss options, and naturally your husband will want to be awake for that, but I have to be honest… it doesn’t look good.”  She clutched her clipboard to her chest and exhaled.  “His white count is off the chart and rapidly increasing.  I’ve never seen anything like this in my career.  I’m hoping Dr. Beck has.”

Individual words and phrases struck Balthazar as she spoke them.  Oncology.  Options.  Rapidly increasing.  This was really happening.

It was barely a comfort, but Balthazar was glad they hadn’t carted him back to the future.  Experts still didn’t know why, but cancer growth accelerated exponentially when a patient was exposed to time travel.  Bureau agents were thoroughly and routinely screened for every form of the disease lest an unknown case prove lethal.  If Vinnie was already this sick, and getting worse so fast, the odds were slim that he would even survive a jaunt to 2187.

Indeed, barely a comfort.

Where was that bloody Bureau doctor?

 

 

They fought hard, but they did not fight long.

After barely a month of intensive chemo and radiation, it became all too clear that Vinnie was a lost cause.  The bone marrow transplant was proposed and dismissed as it was ruled ineffective and likely to diminish the very little time Vinnie had left.

The Bureau doctor arrived, but had little to contribute.  “A cancer this advanced is beyond even our best treatments,” Dr. Calvin explained.  “All we can do now is keep him comfortable.”

“No,” Balthazar whispered; then he raised his voice.  “No.  A person dying of leukemia in 2185?  Really?”  It was unheard of.

“Generally, it would be highly unusual.  But this case is highly unusual.  Drastic growth like your husband’s is nearly always the product of extraordinary circumstances.  Even run-of-the-mill time travel wouldn’t bring it about.  The only thing remotely like it that we’ve seen is in rats that were accidentally exposed to runoff from the Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation.”

Balthazar gasped.  The BCM was highly controversial and hardly spoken of.  He didn’t even really understand what they did.  All he knew was that their technologies threatened the space-time continuum on a level no time-limo ever could.

Suddenly, he recalled a particular detail.

“You mean like… radiation from world-splitting?”

“Not the technical name for it, but yes.”

“The grenade.”  Balthazar didn’t care that Dr. Calvin was scrutinizing him inquisitively.  “Vinnie… he saved the world… the universe… by destroying himself.”

He rushed back into the room where Vinnie was dozing and threw his arms around him.

“You dolty snack-hound,” he whispered as his eyes burned with tears.  “Looks like you’re a hero.  Blast you, thank you, you’re an idiot and I love you.”

He kissed Vinnie’s forehead while Dr. Beck frowned at the apparent gibberish.

He didn’t care what she thought at all.

 

 

So here they were, a week after being issued that prognosis, and Balthazar was weeping, wishing Vinnie would wake up one last time, as he had wished for the time before that and the time before that.  Each time Vinnie woke up, Balthazar felt as though he’d been given another century of life, and each time Vinnie went to sleep, Balthazar felt as though the sun had hidden itself, threatening to never emerge again, to leave the world a dark, frigid husk where it once teemed with life.

Of course, the sun would never really do that.

But Vinnie would.

Not this time, though.

“Balthy?”  Vinnie stirred, and Balthazar’s tears screeched to a halt as he heard his name one last time.

“Yes, Vinnie?”

“Balthy… thank you for everything.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“You want me to be ungrateful?”

“I want you to thank me later.  Perhaps after another fifty years or so,” Balthazar insisted stubbornly.

“Maybe I can.  Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“Probably, but you’re not going there!  Not yet!”

“I… I don’t feel like I am.  Yet.  But I’m not here anymore either.  You have to know that.”

“You love me.  Please stay!”  Balthazar knew he sounded selfish, but their decade together had taught him that he could tell Vinnie whatever selfish thing he was thinking, and Vinnie would gleefully comply, whether it was about what to do in bed or what to eat for dinner.

“I love you.  And I’m not leaving you.  But I am… I am leaving.”

“And I’m staying!  Therefore, you are leaving me!”

Somehow, Vinnie still smiled.  “Balthy… there’s so much you don’t know.  Wait and see.  Then I’ll show you.”

With that, he breathed his last.

“No,” was all Cavendish could say when he saw Dakota die.


	2. Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Balthazar despairs under the weight of his loss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS: Some hints of suicidal thoughts. I don't know if it was just because I was temporarily donning Balthazar's mindset, but I kinda came back to some bad memories while I was writing this. If you're sensitive to detailed descriptions of depression, you might be better off skipping this chapter, or at least asking someone who knows you well to read it first. The next one will be much gentler.

Balthazar didn’t have it in him to plan the funeral, but somehow it happened anyway.

Milo Murphy had returned to town as soon as he got the news, a fully-grown man.  The last time Balthazar and Vinnie had seen him was three years ago at his wedding.  He and his wife now had a baby in tow, with one of those infant-sized crash helmets that conveniently had the kid’s name printed across the front: Kyle Murphy.  Milo was still working on his PhD, but Amanda apparently ran a successful business as an event coordinator and made enough to support the family.  Milo’s friends were here too—Melissa Chase, accompanied by her own wife, Uheri, a pretty archaeologist whom Melissa had interviewed years ago for an article she was writing; and Zack Underwood, still a bachelor, managing the llama farm he had unexpectedly inherited from some obscure relative shortly after graduating from high school.  Sara, Milo’s sister, had also made it; Balthazar couldn’t recall if she was married or not, but from the last he’d heard, she was doing pretty well for herself selling costumes at Dr. Zone conventions.

Vinnie would’ve been proud at how they all turned out.

The rest of the attendees made for a small, intimate group.  Vinnie’s parents and siblings were there, awkwardly offering Balthazar their condolences in the midst of their own bereavement.  Agent Chesapeake, an old friend from Vinnie’s early days as an agent, had come to pay her respects, and Balthazar realized that whatever jealousy he once felt toward her had fizzled out a long, long while ago.  Mr. Block was nowhere to be seen, which oddly made Balthazar feel relieved, but Brick was present, as was, surprisingly, Savannah.  She had left the Bureau nearly two months ago.  There was some drama involved, but Balthazar wasn’t sure what it was, because he had been occupied with taking care of Vinnie.  The rumor was that she was now working with the Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation, but were that the case, she wouldn’t be allowed to say.  She kept a steady face throughout the service, betraying all the emotion of a skilled gambler.

Eulogies were said.  Hymns were sung.  The casket was brought to the cemetery and buried.

Then it was quiet.

Balthazar could only sit there, numbly, after everyone had gone.  Had it been right to bury Vinnie in the past?  Would it have been right to run a funeral procession through the timestream so he could be buried in the future?

He shook himself.  Burying Vinnie wasn’t right at all.

Somehow, nature carried on as though it didn’t know the world was now missing Vinnie.  The breeze blew and sent chills through Balthazar’s thin jacket.  Birds sang, probably quibbling over a worm or a female or a spot in a tree.  And, most incongruously, the sun shone.

The sun.

Balthazar clutched at his pocket, where he had tucked away a pair of sunglasses.  The shades had once concealed the most beautiful pair of eyes in the world from nearly everyone except Balthazar, but they were no longer necessary.  Nobody would ever see those eyes again.

Balthazar kept them anyway.

 

 

He still wasn’t ready to clean the apartment.

He still wasn’t ready to go on missions, and Mr. Block didn’t bother to assign any.

He still wasn’t ready to put on clothes.

He couldn’t feel anything.  And if he slept, not feeling anything was perfectly acceptable.  So that was most of what he did for the next couple of weeks.  Sleep was the best, better than food.  Food reminded him of Vinnie.  But sleep came with those beautiful few minutes after waking up, the minutes where Balthazar didn’t have to remember that Vinnie was gone, before he rolled over and realized the other half of the bed was empty.  Once he realized that, the best thing was to just fall asleep again, and return to a dream world where he wasn’t alone.

 

 

He saw a therapist, but not one of the Bureau’s.

Dr. Karthaus was nice.  She had apparently counseled hundreds of other widows in her career.  She made recommendations—like reaching out to friends, keeping a journal, re-visiting some of the places that had meant something to the couple—which Balthazar wholeheartedly agreed with, as long as he was still on her couch.

Once he got home, they all felt hollow and pointless.  So he wouldn’t do them.

Then the next time he saw her, he’d say he did.

The more he lied, the less Dr. Karthaus meant to him.  Which he kind of appreciated.  When he went in for his sessions, he wasn’t Balthazar mourning the loss of Vinnie.  He was some other man, following a prescribed formula to heal from losing someone who was not Vinnie.  He could make up whatever he wanted about feeling better, moving on, everything he would’ve liked to have been doing but couldn’t.  In her office, he could pretend to be okay.

Eventually, though, he pretended not to need her anymore, and quit going.

It wasn’t like she could bring back Vinnie.

 

 

The one suggestion Dr. Karthaus had suggested that he complied with, looking after Vinnie’s pets, didn’t last for long.

Ginger was an old rabbit.  Catvendish was an old cat.  They really had been bound to die at any moment, even while Vinnie was still healthy.  As much as Balthazar might try, they had to know Vinnie was gone.  And if Vinnie hadn’t stuck around, well, why should they?

Catvendish passed on about a month after Vinnie had.  Ginger hung in there a little longer, two weeks longer, maybe because she knew she was really supposed to be Balthazar’s rabbit.  But then she developed some liver problem, and was in a lot of pain, and the vet had compassionately explained why euthanasia was probably the most humane thing for the animal.

Balthazar hadn’t needed much convincing.

“It’s okay, Ginger,” he had whispered into her floppy ear just before the vet had done the injection.  “You’re safe.  You don’t need to hurt anymore.”

 

 

He should have probably been more disturbed when the colors started disappearing, but he no longer had the emotional reserves to process it.

It had started one morning when, after Balthazar remembered losing Vinnie all over again, he had once again taken out those sunglasses, as had become his ritual, and found that they had turned gray.  Not just duller the way savory food and lively music and everything else with flavor had turned bland lately.  The glasses were literally now gray where they had once been yellow with amber lenses.

Over the next few weeks, it happened to other things.  The track suit in the closet.  The doughnut shop.  The time vehicle.  Deviled eggs.  Lava lamps.  Anything that remotely reminded him of Vinnie.

Was he going mad?  Was this some sort of hallucination?  Should he be prescribed some sort of medication for it?  Balthazar had never heard of hallucinating the colors out of things, but maybe it was a real thing.  Should he go back to Dr. Karthaus?

But what was the point?  She couldn’t talk Vinnie into being alive again, and she couldn’t talk the gray glasses into regaining their original color.

He would just have to live with that too.

 

 

He quit the Bureau.

He was, after all, still the lowest of the low.  He hadn’t stopped Polychronos.  Vinnie had, and died as a result.  That left Balthazar without a single successful mission to his name.  He really wasn’t meant to save the world.  Nobody wanted to partner with him anyway.  Nobody was going to miss him after he left.

There was no going-away cake, no gold watch, no card.  It was all just as well.

Balthazar didn’t want any more goodbyes.

 

 

It wasn’t long after that that he regretted quitting, or more specifically, the loss of the time vehicle.

Maybe there was a way it could be done.  He could hijack the vehicle from the Bureau’s garage, or track down the pieces of Brick and Savannah’s old limo and reassemble them.  Yes, that could work.

Except, minutes after he had thought of it, Savannah showed up at his door, telling him he’d better forget all about it.

“You can’t go back in time to stop it.  Brick and I couldn’t even stop it, and we tried many times.  What Polychronos does is a million times worse than whatever your mutant pistachios did.  You don’t stand a chance against him.”

“Then I’ll stop Vinnie from catching that blasted device!”

“You will not!” Savannah declared harshly.  She wouldn’t even set foot in the apartment.  “What Vinnie did… absorbing the bomb’s shock with his body before it could fully ignite… was something that never occurred to the rest of us, and exactly what needed to be done.  His sacrifice is the closest we can ever expect to come to defeating Polychronos.  Trust me.”

“And why should I?”

“Because Polychronos isn’t just a time traveler!” she told him, exasperated.  “He used to work for the Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation, and I shouldn’t be telling you that.  He spent arguably millennia investing everything into that one device.  Its purpose isn’t just a little anachronistic weirdness like what the BTT puts up with.  We’re talking massive tears in the space-time continuum, egregious alterations to the very laws of physics, wiping the universe from the continuum completely so that it never existed.  I shouldn’t be telling you that either.  But believe me when I say we can’t afford one misstep anywhere near our adversary on the day Polychronos decided to mess around.”  She wrapped her arms around herself.  “That mission, that Brick and I were supposed to do?  That wasn’t just for the Bureau of Time Travel.  That was a test.  Brick failed, and I barely passed.”  She closed her eyes and shook her head.  “Damn him, Dakota passed with flying colors.  He should be the one at the BCM, not me.”

“You bet your arse he should!  I’d give anything to switch your places!”

Savannah took a step back.  Balthazar knew full well the implications of his statement, and didn’t care.  She looked him up and down, and said quietly, “I believe you.  That’s why I’m here.  Because if you so much as lift a finger to change what went down, the consequences will be far direr than anything you can imagine.”  She stared Balthazar in the eye.  “My orders from the BCM were to keep you away from the incident through any means necessary.  _Any_ means.”  She turned her back to him.  “But they never said I had to warn you first.  If you really cared about Vinnie, you wouldn’t do anything stupid to get yourself killed.  I figured… I figured I owe him one.”

She ran away.

 

 

So a rescue via time travel was clearly out.

Balthazar felt angrier the more he dwelled on it.  He had felt so little of anything lately, the anger tasted unfamiliar, like something exotic that couldn’t possibly be coming from him.

He had to get rid of it, somehow.

Punching the wall was a mistake; he might have sprained his wrist, and all he left was a tiny crack in the drywall that would still manage to incur the wrath of Mr. Phillips if he ever found out.

He kicked the trashcan instead.

His instinct for neatness snapped reflexively, and he regretted it more than he regretted punching the wall.  So he rummaged around in the pantry until he found a box of trash bags.  He yanked one out, thrust it open, threw all of the can’s contents inside.  But he didn’t stop there.

He marched all around the blasted apartment, picking up every last blasted piece of blasted garbage he had left lying around like a slob over the past however-many months.

Months.

He scooped up a squished box of Kleenex.

It wasn’t like Balthazar planned to go back to another century, or even another decade.

He threw open the fridge and tossed all the food, not so much as bothering to check the expiration dates.

Who did Savannah think she was, saying he couldn’t change the past?

The last remnants of unused kitty litter and rabbit food finally got pitched.

It wasn’t fair.

An empty chip bag.

Not fair.

A soda can.

“Not fair!” Balthazar yelled out at random.  He was alone, all alone.  Nobody knew or cared if he yelled, or made a mess, or cursed, or stood around in boxers that hadn’t been changed for days.  He might look crazy, but nobody knew.  It was like the tree in the proverbial forest.

A box of… doughnuts?

Balthazar blinked.  How had he not noticed?

It was gray.  So was the soda can, and the chip bag.

He wasn’t just cleaning up after himself now.  He was finally touching Vinnie’s mess from before all this had happened.

It was progress, according to what Dr. Karthaus had said, when he lied about having done it months ago.  But it felt so _wrong_ to do it.

Who cared what was wrong anymore.

Balthazar charged into Vinnie’s half of the bedroom, an entirely colorless void by now, and, without even really looking at what he was throwing out, just picked things up and shoved them into the trash bag.  Socks, both clean and dirty.  Loose playing cards.  The alarm clock whose snooze button had been hit far more times than it ever should have been.  Half of an old tablet that could have been a museum piece or a movie prop.  That last one made Balthazar scratch his head, but Vinnie had been a hoarder, and now there was no one left to offer an explanation.

It needed to go.

But perhaps not just yet.

He moved the tablet to his own side of the room and kept working.

Balthazar didn’t really stop until he reached one curious object that actually wasn’t so colorless—a shark tooth necklace, just casually shoved into one corner of a drawer full of other detritus.  On both sides of the tooth there were red and blue and yellow beads—why would this alone be so colorful?

The answer was obvious—it wasn’t Vinnie’s.  But it sure wasn’t Balthazar’s.  So who did that leave?

 

 

Returning the trinket to its rightful owner seemed trivial, but it was an excuse to talk to someone, and wasn’t that exactly what he was supposed to be doing?

Chesapeake answered the door, still in her pajamas.  Her hair had gotten longer, and she sported a new tattoo in some calligraphy Balthazar didn’t understand.

“I think this is yours,” he said, holding out the necklace at arm’s length.  Chesapeake inspected it, and then her face broke out into a small but sincere smile as she took it from him.

“Thought I lost this years ago,” she said.

“It was with Dakota’s belongings.”

Chesapeake nodded.  “Yeah, he probably meant to give it back and forgot.”  She gestured for him to enter her apartment.

There was nowhere to sit down, really, until she cleared some empty beer bottles off of the couch.  It had never occurred to Balthazar that she might be just as much of a slob as Vinnie.  It didn’t truly matter.  “I cannot stay long,” Balthazar lied.

Chesapeake shrugged.  “Fair.  Oh, and if this is about borrowing the Jeep, well, it’s busted, and apparently you’re on some kind of no-fly list.”

Balthazar crossed his arms indignantly.

“Heard it three times from three different agents.  Guess it’s pretty serious.”

That the Bureau could put so much effort into deliberately ensuring the death of one of its own agents was infuriating.  “So you’re not going to bend the rules for me?  Or your old partner?”

“Hey, I would, totally, but like I said, the Jeep’s busted.  They’ve stuck me at a desk job and try to keep me out of the time stream as much as possible myself.”  She cracked open a can of beer.  “Want one?”

Balthazar shook his head.  “They think you’re a risk too?”

“I guess they know Vinnie and I used to be tight.”

“Yes, he’s told me much of your, um, exploits.  In Babylon.”

Chesapeake grinned sheepishly.  “Yeah, those were some crazy times.  But it was a crazy mission and we needed to deal.  See, some rival to the throne was trying to raise an army from the dead.  And if he succeeded, there would’ve been some kind of massive curse afflicting all of humanity for the remainder of history.  So we had to break his tablet.”  She reached into a drawer and withdrew a piece that looked very much like Vinnie’s, except this one was a rusty brown color.  “We each kept half for a souvenir.”  She returned it to the drawer and closed it.  “I bet he still has his half somewhere.  We used to joke about going back to resurrect David Bowie.”

She took a long drink from her beer.

It hit Balthazar all at once.  The right answer lay clearly before him.  How did Chesapeake not see it?

“You know what?” he asked.  “I might take you up on that drink after all.”

Chesapeake nodded and went back to the kitchen.

The second she was out of sight, Balthazar was in her drawer, snatching up the tablet, and shoving it into his coat pocket.

He stayed long enough to down that wretched brown liquid and make small talk.  It was awkward as anything.  He and Chesapeake were probably both relieved when he finally hit the road.

It was a chilly day, but the tablet seemed to burn in his coat pocket, keeping him warm with its promise.

 

 

Having the tablet was one thing.  Knowing how to use it was quite different.

Balthazar spent the next few months on the internet, at the library, anywhere he could find information on this mysterious tablet.  He spent another month figuring out how to translate it.  He skipped the portion with all the specific terms of the curse; he didn’t care what they were, and ignorance was bliss.

Finally, though, he was ready.

It was the first time since the burial that he had come near the gravesite and, appropriately, the anniversary of the day Vinnie died.  The entire cemetery was washed in that black-and-white emptiness that followed any time Balthazar tried to get too close to Vinnie.  This was going to be an unpleasant task.  He might get arrested.  But anything, anything was worth it to retrieve what was his.

He jammed his shovel into the earth and set to work.

It was strangely therapeutic, exhuming the grave, as tedious as it was.  Every time a wave of anger or despair hit Balthazar, he just worked a little faster until it went away.

He was nearly there…

He hoped that the adhesive he had used to repair the tablet would hold up.  The spell might not work otherwise.  He uttered the first verse of the incantation, just to see what would happen.

The cuneiform flashed bright red for a second before fading again.

He couldn’t see anything.  It was still night, after all, and after that spectacle, Balthazar’s eyes needed to adjust again to the dark.  But when they finally did, he saw he was not alone.

Three figures hovered over him, three familiar figures.

“The hell are you doing?” Zack demanded.

“Never mind, children.  You’d best be on your way.”

Melissa crossed her arms.  “One, we’re hardly children anymore.”

Milo piped up, “Two, it’s the anniversary of Vinnie’s death, and we thought we’d find you here.  We weren’t sure, because it’s not like you’ve answered any of our emails or phone calls, but it was worth a shot.”

“And three,” Zack added, “you’re digging up your own husband’s grave at midnight, and we’re supposed to believe something isn’t seriously messed up here?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try us!” Milo pleaded.

“Never mind understanding, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”  Melissa pointed to the tablet.  “Where the hell did you get that?”

“I’ve spent some time now studying its use.”

“Then you have to know it’s cursed.”

“I’ve made peace with the fact.”

“Did you even read the fine print?”  She jumped down so she was standing beside Balthazar.  “Uheri told me all about this one from her own studies.  You can’t play with this ancient curse stuff, it’s serious.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t care!”

“Well you should!”

“People deal with curses all the time!”

Milo paused thoughtfully.  “That much is true,” he admitted, “but it’s not easy.  My dad had to show me the ropes when I was younger, and now Kyle is almost to his terrible twos.  We had to buy three new dishwashers this week.”

Melissa shook her head.  “The curse you’re looking at and Murphy’s Law are two wildly different things,” she insisted.

“How would you even know?”

“Gee I don’t know, maybe because my wife studies ancient tablets for a living and I’ve studied the intricate mechanisms of Murphy’s Law since I was goddamn eight?”  Melissa shook her head.  “It’s apples to oranges, and I’ll tell you why.  Murphy’s Law was never meant to be evil.”

Milo looked up, shocked.  Evidently, he himself had never heard this part of the story.

Melissa continued, “One thousand years ago, a man wanted to know why there was suffering in the world.  The original Murphy.  He thought maybe, if he could understand it, then he could show enough compassion to stop it.  And when he was granted a request from a forest dryad… long story… he asked if there was any way to make sense of it all.  As it turned out, the only way he would ever come to understand the world’s suffering was to experience every kind of it.  But that was too much for one man’s life, so for him to have his wish, his whole family line must bear the curse.  The dryad knew this.  Murphy knew this.  And he accepted it anyway.  Murphy agreed to suffer so others wouldn’t have to.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” Balthazar muttered.

“But because of his selflessness, and because the dryad was good… she blessed him, too.  She bestowed the curse at his request, but she also decreed that Murphy and all of his descendants would be strong enough to handle whatever came their way.  That’s why they haven’t been destroyed by now.  That’s why Milo is brave and kind.  And that’s why you can’t expect anything like it if you go through with this.  Because this… this isn’t selfless.  This isn’t going to just affect you.  And you know it.”

Balthazar dropped both the tablet and the shovel, then fell to his knees.  He buried his face in his hands.  “I suppose it couldn’t just affect me,” he whispered.  “I’m cursed already.  But would… would it affect Vinnie?”

“Cavendish, the general who meant to use that tablet didn’t care whom it would affect.  He didn’t need people, he needed bodies, so he could win his war.  If you did this, what came up out of the ground might not even be Vinnie at all,” Melissa warned.

Balthazar exhaled.  “So then there truly is no way I’m not going to be alone.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way!” Milo protested.  He jumped off the edge of the pit, taking a bit of a mudslide with him and landing rather ungracefully in front of Balthazar.  “I’m not my ancestor.  I haven’t known every kind of suffering.  I don’t know what you’re going through.  I do know that if anything happened to Amanda, it would destroy me.  I know that ever since we fell in love I’ve been terrified because that possibility is very real.  And I know that if it happens… I won’t actually be alone.”  He looked up at Melissa and Zack.  “You don’t know this, but a few months into our marriage, Amanda had a miscarriage.  We were devastated.  Amanda kept blaming herself for forgetting to take some vitamin somewhere, and I kept wondering if it was my fault for being, well, a Murphy.  But whenever it got bad, we knew we could pick up the phone, and Melissa or Zack would be at the other end of it.  And if it got really, really bad, they would be on our doorstep.  Obviously, they couldn’t change what happened.  But they got us through it.”

Melissa climbed down next to the men in the grave.  “And before that, when Uheri and I started dating, her parents threatened to disown her for being a lesbian.  We were still in college, and if they did that, she would’ve had to leave and we’d never see each other again.  We were really scared.  But Milo and Zack were there, and we knew that even though there wasn’t a whole lot they could do, at least they loved us, and accepted us for who we are.”

Melissa and Milo both looked at Zack.

Zack held up his hands.  “Wait wait, so now I have to tell a story too?”

“Yes,” his friends said in unison.

Zack sighed.  “Fine.  So my thing is… I didn’t actually get into any of the colleges I applied to.  With my mom being a doctor, I thought for sure that meant I was a failure who would never amount to anything.  And well… you can probably figure out the rest.”

“Melissa bought you a lot of ice cream and wiped the boogers off your face when you were done crying, if memory serves,” Milo elaborated.

“Dude!”

“Your friends love you,” Melissa sang.

Balthazar felt his blood rush to his face.  They still didn’t get it.

“But you _had friends_ ,” Balthazar stressed.

“And _so do you_ ,” Milo asserted.  “We’ve been worried like crazy about you, especially after we heard you quit the Bureau, or will quit the Bureau, or however it works with time travel.  Like I said, we tried to get a hold of you and you never answered.  We… we wondered if…”  He couldn’t say what he was thinking, but Balthazar had a nagging suspicion, and if it was correct, then the trio hadn’t exactly been wrong to worry.

“We wondered if you were okay,” Melissa finished diplomatically.

“We should’ve come sooner,” Milo apologized.

“No no no, you’ve had your own lives to lead,” Balthazar refused politely.  “I’ve been getting along all right, as you can see.”

“Like I said before, you’re _digging up your dead husband’s grave_!” Zack pointed out.

“We don’t have to stick around if you’re not comfortable with it,” Milo said, “but you have to know we’re here when you need us.”  He turned around and climbed out of the pit.

Melissa followed suit.  “Vinnie loved you more than anyone.  But that doesn’t mean he was the only one who loved you.  Nor did he want to be.”

“You gotta let us in,” Zack said.  “It’s what he would want.”

“Please,” Milo said, offering Balthazar his hand.

Balthazar paused.  He looked at where he had dropped the tablet.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he stomped on it, hard, breaking it all over again.

Then he took Milo’s hand and let him help him up.


	3. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Balthazar's mourning is officially over.

From that point on, Balthazar had a life.

It wasn’t a happy one.  He didn’t socialize much, other than the occasional visits with Milo and his friends.  He stayed in the same apartment.  He took a job as an actual concession stand worker to pay the bills, until he got entirely fed up with pistachios and got a position as a middle-school janitor instead.  Apparently, the number of students at Jefferson County Middle School had tripled since Milo had attended, and they needed a second custodian to keep up.  Some days he felt like he had turned into a shriveled old man barking at kids to keep off the grass.

But it was more bearable than it had been.  He adopted a new rabbit whom he named Caramel and repainted the apartment.  He did his laundry on a regular schedule and cooked most of his own meals, treating himself to Chinese takeout on Friday nights.  He went to the library and checked out books twice a week.  He considered hitching a ride back to the future, but there was really nothing for him there.

Sometime around two years after Vinnie died, Zack got married, and Balthazar went to his wedding.  Milo and Amanda had two more children, both girls, mercifully free of the Murphy curse and thus not a nightmare to babysit now and then.  Melissa and Uheri spent a lot of time traveling, but they always came back with some great stories.  They were all so young and full of life.  At least Balthazar got to watch them be happy.

He tried dating here and there, but it never really worked out.  He just wasn’t as young as he used to be.  Younger men typically weren’t interested at best and found him creepy at worst, except for the ones who had creepy fetishes themselves.  And older men, at least in this era, often had their own stories of partners they had lost to the AIDS crisis decades ago.  On one level, it seemed to make sense to date a fellow widower because they had so much in common, but to have the loss of not one but two deceased lovers hovering over the couple was just too much for Balthazar.  He didn’t want to think that he’d still be alive decades from now and still trying to get over Vinnie, the way these men were.  It was bad enough that for every couple, someone had to die first; but it was truly cruel that someone could be left alone for so long.

Even if he wasn’t truly alone.

Often after a couple dates with a new boyfriend, Balthazar ended up having to call Milo and, to his credit, the young man faithfully returned whenever he was needed.  But pulling Milo away from the beautiful life he had set up for himself so that Balthazar could have a shoulder to cry on felt wrong, so eventually he gave up on dating altogether just to save everyone some time.

And actually, giving up on dating felt liberating once he had made that decision.  He had other things in his life to pursue, even if they were as trivial as brushing a rabbit’s fur or scrubbing foul words off of bathroom stalls.  It gave him time to relax and reflect.

A good chunk of the world stayed gray, though.  After about five years of that, Balthazar had forgotten that this was anything unusual.

 

 

The nice thing about the middle school was that, for all the meteorites, stampedes, and mutants that had hit it over the years, it stayed the same.

The kids changed, sure, but the lockers, the cafeteria, the bathrooms, the secret tunnel in the basement, all stayed in the same place, day after day, year after year.  Balthazar could always count on mopping the gymnasium on Monday, scrubbing down the cafeteria on Tuesday, mowing the grass on Wednesday.  He knew the location of every trash can, broom, and “wet floor” sign in the building.  He knew which kids were prone to leaving their math books behind at the end of the day.  He knew not to disturb Mr. Draco when he was napping downstairs.

Years of working there had mapped the building out for him so that he knew every last room.

Until that changed.

 

 

 

The day had already been going strangely—time had passed at an uneven rate, or so it seemed.  Twenty seconds felt like four hours, and then six hours felt like five minutes.  He had seen the same kid at opposite ends of the building, he just knew it.  It snowed, but the thermometer read seventy degrees, and it did not feel cold.

And, most peculiarly of all, he found the crushed remains of the Quantum Localizer adhered to the bottom of one of the cafeteria tables with discarded chewing gum.

He was sure he had cleaned that blasted table just yesterday.

Having seen much of the horrors of middle school by now, little fazed him, and he was wearing gloves anyway, so he peeled off the Quantum Localizer to inspect.  It was definitely his, one he had lost back when Milo was still a student.  The Bureau must have never bothered to recover it.  The serial number matched and everything.

By now he knew he couldn’t use time travel for anything anymore, but he was curious.  If he managed to fix it, would it still work?  Would the Bureau attempt to reclaim it?  Were they still worried about him attempting to alter fate?

Well, Savannah didn’t magically show up to snatch it from his grasp, so either they’d forgotten about him, or he would never be able to get it functional.

He pocketed it and carried on with his work.

 

 

It wasn’t until he was prompted by an incident in the eighth-grade chemistry lab to recover some neutralizing agent (whose label he intended to read very thoroughly) that he ended up in the corner of the basement that everyone was sort of scared of.  He thought little of it, for he had been here many times, but like everything else about today, something was off.

When he dropped his flashlight, and leaned over to pick it up, the Quantum Localizer fell out of his pocket.  The moment he recovered it and stood up again, he realized that the neutralizing agent was no longer where it had always been, but in the next room over.

Where, formerly, there was no “next room over.”

Was this a new hallucination?  It had to be.  There had definitely never been a door there before, but here was an entire supply closet that he, the janitor of several years now, would have certainly known about had it existed.

The door was wide open.  Did he dare enter?

Well, he had to retrieve the neutralizing agent.

If it was a hallucination, he wouldn’t be able to enter anyway.

And if it wasn’t?

Dash it all, he needed that neutralizing agent.

So he marched inside, stepping over the threshold—

And now he was in freefall.

 

 

There was no doubt about it now—this was all an elaborate dream.

And it wasn’t brought about by the familiar melancholy to which he had grown accustomed—some sort of full-blown psychosis had to exist to cause such vivid and yet nonsensical imagery.

He was still falling, but not into darkness, or into light—instead, it was a vast tunnel of gray that seemed to go on forever; if there was a bottom, it was a very long way away.

“Balthy, no!”

He whirled around.  It was a powerful voice, reverberating through every fiber of every being.  Yes, fiber… now that he inspected more closely, Balthazar could see that the tunnel that surrounded him was not a solid wall, but rather a forest of threads, gray strings that were not spaced particularly close together, yet still managed to obscure anything in the distance, if indeed anything existed outside of those threads.

They vibrated as the voice echoed again.  “Balthazar, please!”

That voice.  He would recognize it anywhere.

But he didn’t see anyone.

Still… it was coming from over _there_ , not that “there” was particularly distinct from anywhere else in this thicket.

He grabbed hold of a thread, and was surprised that it didn’t burn his hand the way one might expect a falling rope to do; perhaps he wasn’t falling as fast as he thought.  Or maybe he wasn’t falling at all; maybe he was just weightless.

No, there had to be some weight.  By swinging the thread, he was able to muster enough momentum to jump to the next, and the one after that, like Tarzan of the apes on vines in the jungle.

“Balthazar…”

The voice was _sobbing_ now.

He swung faster.  It got easier once he realized he had no fear of falling.

“Balthy, I need you!”

He was flying now, not literally, but having mastered the string, his confidence and desperation propelled him rapidly.

“Vinnie?” he called.

“Balthy?”  This time, Vinnie’s voice was normal—not booming across the landscape, but calling as though from across a field.

“Vinnie… where are you?”

“Over here!”

Faster, faster, until…

The thread stopped.

The forest had an edge.

A great chasm loomed beneath him, and he was filled with the terror of knowing, somehow, that if he fell into it, then he really would disappear.

He gripped his thread tightly.

But while the chasm was infinitely deep, and infinitely long, it was by no means infinitely wide.

Another forest of gray string dangled just across the way.

And in the midst of all that gray hung a single dot of bright yellow.

 

 

“Vinnie?  Vinnie, is that really you?” Balthazar called across the gap.

“Yeah, it’s me… sorry to leave you hangin’!”

It was really him.

Suddenly, Balthazar hoped it was really a hallucination, because the only alternative could be—

“Hey Balthy, are we dead?  ’Cause if this is heaven, it needs some serious renovations.”

 _Are we dead?_   Wouldn’t someone who had been deceased for half of a decade know his way around the afterlife by now?  And what kind of afterlife was this, anyway?  There was certainly nothing heavenly about it, but it wasn’t exactly hellish either.  Aside from dreading the chasm, Balthazar didn’t sense any kind of torturous presence.  And where were all the other people?  Shouldn’t the place be flooded with the billions of humans who had perished over the course of history?

“I… I don’t believe we’re dead, no,” Balthazar said uncertainly, and then stopped.  Vinnie _was_ dead, he knew that for sure.  So had Balthazar just lied to his husband?

Or did some part of him honestly not think Vinnie was dead?

No, it was a hallucination, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t—

“So then where are we?” Vinnie called.

“How the devil would I know?” Balthazar snapped, and then felt a wave of guilt.  Thirty seconds of being not-reunited with his not-husband, and he was already being short with him as he had been fifteen years ago.

“Welp, ’least now I know it’s really you over there!”  Vinnie’s sing-song tone managed to irk him, soothe him, and pain him all at once.  “You think there’s any way across this thing?”

Across.

Across was a suicide mission.

Across lay the uncertainty of nonexistence.

But Vinnie was “across.”  And Vinnie existed.

No, he didn’t.

Yes, he did.

And he was over there… “across.”

“I’ve just been swinging to get around,” Balthazar told his lover.  “But I don’t think I could quite reach the other side.”

“Yeah, same.”  Suddenly, Vinnie shifted his posture, and started pumping back and forth, back and forth on one of the threads.  “But could you make it halfway, at least?”

Dammit, he was going to try.

If there was any way to hold Vinnie’s hand in his again… he was going to try.

Forward, back… forward, back…

They drew closer and closer to each other.  With each attempt to make contact, Balthazar could make out more and more of Vinnie’s form.

The curly brown hair.  The tracksuit.  The sunglasses, restored to their proper yellow.

The sunglasses.

Balthazar reached into his pocket, where he had placed them that morning, as he often did when he was feeling particularly bereaved.

They were gone.

That didn’t prove anything.

Closer… closer…

He reached out his hand.  Vinnie reached out his.

Almost.

But no.

Each fell back to his own side.

Dammit… he had wanted so badly to take his lover by the hand once more.  Balthazar felt hot just thinking about it.  The embraces he had missed for all this time, literally dangling a few inches away from him…

He swung just a little harder…

They met, not hand-to-hand, but face-to-face.

 

 

At the instant of their collision, everything about the world changed.

The chasm ceased to be.  The threads merged and closed the gap.  Only they weren’t threads anymore, they were solid forms, and they weren’t gray, but the full spectrum of colors and perhaps even then some.

The world was forming around them.

But none of that really even mattered.

Because one way or another, he was back with Vinnie.

Both men sank into the kiss.

 

 

 

They were interrupted by the sound of a bell ringing.

Balthazar looked up.

They were back in the supply closet now.  It seemed to be their thing.

No, he had just imagined all that.  He had to hang on to reality.

He had not just fallen into an alternate dimension and been reunited with Vinnie.  That was impossible.  _Vinnie was dead._ And Balthazar had not seen him.  It was an illusion, a grand one, but an illusion nevertheless.

He had probably slipped and hit his head on some—

“Uhh… Balthy?”

Vinnie was _still there_.

“Balthy!  It’s you!  It’s really you!”  Vinnie threw his arms around Balthazar and squeezed tightly, pushing the wind out of him.

This couldn’t be a hallucination.  It… he was too solid.

So was he a ghost?  Balthazar scrutinized Vinnie.  Ghosts were supposed to more or less resemble their state at the time they died, right?  That was how there were so many headless ghosts or ghosts with knives stuck inside them.

But what sat before Balthazar wasn’t a frail body consumed by cancer, losing hair.  If anything, Vinnie looked like he had gained around thirty pounds since Balthazar had last seen him healthy, and a short but distinct beard adorned his chin.

This wasn’t a ghost, and it wasn’t Balthazar’s imagination.

Somehow, some way, Vinnie had returned.

“Yes… it’s really me…” Balthazar assured him.

 

 

Balthazar ditched work.  The blasted chemistry lab could wait.

Hand in hand, staring into each other’s eyes except when they needed to cross the street, the couple set off for their apartment.

 _Their_ apartment.

Their home.  They were going home, together.

Whatever had happened in that basement, in that dimension, Balthazar didn’t care.

Conversation was brief.  Balthazar was hoping Vinnie might offer up some explanation as to where exactly they had been, on how he had returned, but it didn’t seem to occur to him once that he had even been dead.

What if he didn’t know?

How could he not know?

Should Balthazar tell him?

If he told him, would that somehow undo whatever had brought him back?

Balthazar shuddered.  He couldn’t risk it.

“Hey, uh, Balthy… are you all right?” Vinnie asked as they were waiting at a crosswalk.

“Very much so,” Balthazar told him.  “I’ve just… I’ve missed you.”

“Same.  I was worried sick!”

Balthazar flinched at the word “sick,” but he didn’t think Vinnie noticed.

The signal changed, but they almost missed it, because at that moment they spontaneously went back to kissing each other.  Who cared if they were in public.  Who cared if none of this made any sense.

Balthazar once again _had Vinnie_.

 

 

They were almost home when Balthazar, for the first time, noticed something unrelated to Vinnie—the display window of an antiques shop.  There, in the middle, was a big lava lamp.

A big _red_ lava lamp.

With bright _blue_ lava.

“It’s beautiful,” Balthazar breathed.  Right then and there, he walked in the front door.

“Uh, Balthy?  What are we doing?”

“I’m buying you that lamp.”

Vinnie grinned.  “It is pretty nifty.  I always wanted one of those, you know?”

“I do know,” he said as he brought it up to the register.  “Also, I think when we’re done here, we should get some doughnuts.”

“Sweet, what kind?”

“ _Pink_ frosted.”


	4. Honeymoon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, this chapter's done with.  
> We'll see how much writing I get done this week with work.  
> Out of curiosity, did anyone actually listen to "Here Without You" while reading the first couple of chapters?

As soon as Vinnie and Balthazar reached the parking lot of the strip mall, panic crept up Balthazar’s spine.

This was not unusual, because it was nearing the end of the month and Mr. Phillips often got cranky about the rent.  However, upon his death, Vinnie had naturally dropped off the lease.  How would Mr. Phillips react upon seeing him again?

How would the Bureau react?

How would Milo, Melissa, and Zack react?

Would they jump to the wrong conclusion, and assume Balthazar had gone ahead and resurrected Vinnie after years of trusting him not to?  Surely they would believe him when he told them that this wasn’t his fault… right?  But even if they believed he hadn’t done it himself, would they believe that having him back was a good thing?  _Was_ it a good thing?  Just because Balthazar hadn’t used any nefarious means didn’t mean nefarious means hadn’t been used… but who else wanted Vinnie desperately enough to risk invoking a curse?

So maybe there was yet another explanation?

They were at the door.  Balthazar started fumbling for his key, but Vinnie had already beaten him to it.  Wait, how did Vinnie have a key?  The door had had its lock changed some six months prior, so even if he had had one on him when he died…

_When he died_.  The words still left a bitter taste in Balthazar’s mouth.

“Hey, check it out,” Vinnie said casually as he noticed the day’s mail piled up on a table.  “Buy-one-get-one extra-larges at… Vegan International Pizza.”  He frowned.  “In what reality is it even still pizza without cheese on it?”

_In what reality_.

Of _course_.

Somehow, whatever had happened in the basement at the school had managed to bring Vinnie over from some alternate reality.  Some reality where, obviously, he wasn’t dead.  And clearly, he didn’t know he was supposed to be dead in this one.

In which case, Balthazar would have to hide Vinnie not only from the Bureau and their friends, but from Vinnie himself.

“Caramel!” Vinnie exclaimed as the rabbit hopped into the room.  He knelt down to pet her.  “Caramel, look who it is!”

Evidently, Vinnie’s reality still involved them adopting a second rabbit, and even naming it Caramel, but Balthazar realized it was only a matter of time before _something_ was out of place.

Perhaps he could put that moment off by staying as far away from this life as possible.

“Vinnie, love?” he asked, reaching out to pet Caramel himself.  “After everything, um, strange that just went down… well, I’m feeling spontaneous.  I think we should take a long weekend and get away from it all.  Just the two of us.  I know a highly-reviewed kennel that accepts rabbits, so she’ll be in good hands.”

Vinnie smiled.  “Sounds fun.  Where do you want to go?”

 

 

They hopped a flight to San Diego, cost be damned.  Vinnie had always loved zoos, and by Jove, now that Balthazar had a chance, he was taking his husband to the very finest zoo the world had to offer.  The first-class tickets had curiously been Vinnie’s idea, which surprised Balthazar, but if it was what Vinnie wanted, Balthazar certainly was not going to refuse.  Besides, the first-class cabin was much more comfortable, and Balthazar was open to having a glass or two of wine in-flight.

Vinnie had brought headphones, and plugged them into the jack for music during the flight.  He offered one of the earbuds to Balthazar, who accepted.

“So what station do we want?” Vinnie asked as the plane lifted off the runway.

Balthazar suddenly remembered a conversation from a long time ago.  “You pick,” he insisted.

“You mean it?”

“I do,” he affirmed.  “Every day for a month.”

Vinnie frowned, puzzled, but let it go.  He picked some weird kitschy polka thing, and Balthazar only smiled and nodded.

It was something of a late flight, so they had already eaten at an Italian restaurant in the airport, and as it often did while he was alive (Balthazar couldn’t help but think of it that way, even though Vinnie was clearly alive in the here and now), having a stomach full of meatballs and creamy alfredo sauce was making Vinnie sleepy.  Balthazar could tell.

“I’m… I’m all… I’m all riiiiight,” Vinnie said, trying and failing to stifle a yawn as Balthazar pulled a pillow and a thick, fleecy blanket out of his carry-on bag and passed them to his partner.  “I can’t take your pillow.  You need your sleep, too.”

“You haven’t taken my pillow,” Balthazar corrected him as he flipped the armrest between them upright.  He spread the blanket out so it covered them both.  “You _are_ my pillow.”  He leaned against Vinnie, who giggled a tiny bit as he wrapped one of his thick arms around Balthazar’s shoulders.

So much softness, so much warmth, so much strength.  Balthazar felt safer in Vinnie’s embrace than he had in a long, long while.  Having his body resting on Vinnie’s, covered by Vinnie’s, he could practically feel the flavor of his blood change from the bitterness it was used to, to the peaceful sweetness of love.  Every cell of his body seemed to shift to accommodate this happiness that engulfed him, like the scales of a chameleon changing to match their surroundings.

When Vinnie started snoring, that only made it better.  Balthazar wanted to sleep too, but he also wanted to watch Vinnie sleep, to feel his slumber, that he was at rest and yet still very much living.

He knew, even more so than on their wedding day, that he was the luckiest man in the world.

In any world.

Any world… including whatever world Vinnie had just left.

For the first time, the bliss of the flight was tainted by something sour, a ripple of guilt.

Now that Balthazar had Vinnie, that meant Vinnie’s other world did not.  Including the love of Vinnie’s life in that world… that world’s Balthazar.

Did he know that his Vinnie was gone yet?  Technically it had only been a matter of hours.  Vinnie had said something about missing Balthazar; did that mean he and the other-Balthazar hadn’t seen each other in a while either, in days, possibly weeks?  At what point would other-Balthazar realize that his partner was missing?

How would he feel?

Would he feel like Balthazar had?

Balthazar squeezed the blanket in his fist.  In all fairness, other-Balthazar had had Vinnie for the entirety of the past five years, plus their ten years together before that.  He probably didn’t even appreciate Vinnie the way he should.  And how did he have any more right to Vinnie than Balthazar, anyway?  As far as Vinnie knew, they were the same.  He loved them both.  They both loved him.

They were both lost without him.

Now, at least, this Balthazar was found again.

Balthazar planted a kiss on Vinnie’s forehead before succumbing to sleep.

 

 

They hit the zoo first thing Friday morning, and stayed until closing time.  Balthazar marveled at just how _bright_ everything was—the color had returned so that the giraffes were yellow and the alligators were green and the scarlet macaws were, well, scarlet.  Even the creatures that were supposed to be gray, like koalas and elephants, seemed to be a _happier_ kind of gray.  And every now and then, when Vinnie adjusted his sunglasses—did he do it on purpose?—Balthazar caught a glimpse of the blue and brown he had come to love so dearly.

It made it all the more exciting when they returned to their hotel, and Balthazar begged to keep the lights on, just so he could admire those eyes some more.  Vinnie obliged, and ordered a raspberry pie from room service, a scrumptious violet-red raspberry pie, as though intentionally reminding Balthazar of the time he had first properly looked into Vinnie’s eyes.

The rest of the weekend was spent pursuing other attractions—the beach, an amusement park, historical sites—and yet also felt leisurely.  Sleeping in or having sex, they spent much time in the hotel’s bed, and Balthazar was glad they had sprung for a room with a comfy mattress.

Monday they didn’t even leave the hotel until five in the afternoon, enjoying the amenities offered—they ran on the treadmills in the gym, they swam in the pool, they lifted weights.  Vinnie didn’t complain about the workout; on the contrary, it was his idea in the first place.  But Balthazar didn’t want to wear him out too much, so at Balthazar’s suggestion, they interspersed the exercises with a fancy lunch in the hotel restaurant and a long, soothing soak in the room’s Jacuzzi.  So much about this last day was simultaneously soothing and invigorating.  Balthazar cursed the fact that they had purchased round-trip tickets and so had no choice but to return Tuesday morning.

Still, Tuesday morning was tomorrow, not tonight.

“What else would you like to do while we’re here, love?” Balthazar asked Vinnie as they completed the last lap of a mile-run around the indoor jogging track.

Vinnie smiled.  “You’ve been letting me pick all weekend… what do _you_ want to do?”

Balthazar randomly thought back to a time when he asked Vinnie that same question, about ten years ago, after a different workout.  Vinnie had wanted to go ice skating, at the time to Balthazar’s chagrin, but now Balthazar’s only regret was that he had never once taken Vinnie ice skating again after that.

So they found a nearby rink, which wasn’t crowded, it being a Monday night and all.  As he had last time, Vinnie proceeded quickly to zip around in graceful figure-eights and toe-spins, but unlike last time, Balthazar made every effort to keep up, as shaky as he might have been.  Before Balthazar might have been too embarrassed to continue after tripping over his own laces and landing hard on his elbow, but this time all he could do was smile happily as Vinnie offered him a rosy hand to lift him up.  Then Vinnie scooped Balthazar into his arms and carried him around the rink, bridal-style, for about five laps until the attendant made them cut it out.

“It’s all just as well,” Balthazar assured Vinnie.  “I was getting a tad chilly and perhaps movement will warm me up.”  He picked up speed, went about ten yards, and fell again.  Once more, Vinnie helped him get back on his feet.

“I’ve got a better plan for keeping you warm,” he whispered into Balthazar’s ear.

“By Jove, let’s please.”

 

 

It was their last night before having to return to Swamp City, to the real world, and Balthazar didn’t want to waste a second of it sleeping.

This might be his last chance to make love to Vinnie before Vinnie noticed Something amiss about this reality, something about their apartment or the school or perhaps even Balthazar himself that simply wasn’t how he remembered it.  Failing to mention the matter was one thing, but if Vinnie asked him point-blank, Balthazar knew he couldn’t lie.  He knew he would have to tell Vinnie the truth, and face the repercussions, whatever they might be.  He prayed, more than anything, that Vinnie wouldn’t immediately insist on returning to his reality and his Balthazar, in part because Balthazar knew that if that was what Vinnie really wanted, he couldn’t say no.  He felt bad enough about not having come clean sooner.

What he wasn’t expecting was for Vinnie to come clean first.

 

 

The candles were lit.  There was chocolate and wine and fancy music.

If this was their last night together, Balthazar wanted to do it right.

“It’s beautiful, Balthy,” Vinnie whispered, taking off Balthazar’s top hat and kissing the top of his head.

“Not as beautiful as you.”  Balthazar stroked the fuzzy patch on Vinnie’s chin.  Maybe the beard made him look a little sloppy, but Vinnie was still every bit as adorable as the day they had met.  Being free to touch that rich brown hair was a luxury beyond any of the weekend’s splurges.

“Aw, come here, you,” Vinnie said, kissing Balthazar lightly on the lips and unbuttoning his shirt.  “I never did understand how you never choked with your collar so tight.  How do you breathe?”

“One takes pride in one’s appearance,” Balthazar said simply, without the nagging he formerly would have issued with the statement.  Dress shirts versus t-shirts.  Did it matter when both were coming off?

“With abs like yours, I’d take pride in skipping the shirt altogether,” Vinnie said, running a hand down Balthazar’s abdomen.

“Very well… in that case…”  Balthazar peeled the shirt the rest of the way off as Vinnie removed his own.  Balthazar had just placed a hand on his belt buckle when Vinnie grabbed it instead.

“Allow me?” he asked, and Balthazar nodded and let go.

It was as he was taking his hand away that Vinnie gasped loudly.

“Balthy… what’s that?”

“What’s what?” Balthazar asked, genuinely confused.

“On your arm.”

Balthazar looked, but in the low light, all he could make out was…

“That bruise.”

“Oh, right.  I took a bit of a fall at the ice rink, if you’ll recall, but it isn’t sore enough to sour this evening.”

“That’s not it.”  An edge of something fast—was it panic?—had crept into Vinnie’s voice, and he let go of Balthazar’s belt.

“Vinnie?”

Vinnie flipped on the light switch, grabbed Balthazar’s elbow, and examined it thoroughly.

“Do you mind?  I’d really rather we resumed—”

“We need to get you to a doctor, ASAP!”

“Over a bruise?”

“Sure, it’s just a bruise, until it’s not.”  Vinnie’s voice caught, and he started pacing.

“Vincent, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but—”

“It’s what’s gotten into you that I’m worried about!  This is exactly how it started last time!”

“‘Last time’?”

Vinnie nodded.  “When you left!”

Balthazar nearly knocked over the lampstand.  A peculiar anger he hadn’t known was there started bubbling up inside of him.  If the candles didn’t catch the room on fire, that anger would.  “When _I_ left?  I beg your pardon, but that was you!”

“Me?  Abandon you?  The way you abandoned me?”  Vinnie shook his head ferociously.  “Never!”

“But you did!  That’s why I’m intent on making the most of our time together, now that you’re back and I don’t know how long you’ll stay this time!”

“I never left!”  Vinnie collapsed to the floor and buried his face in his knees.  He was literally crying.  “But you… it was five years ago, Balthy.  Five years ago when you died.  And I was all alone.”

 

 

_Vinnie had done everything right._

_He had taken Balthazar to get checked out at the first sign of illness, despite his husband’s protests that he was fine.  Vinnie couldn’t explain how, but in his gut, he knew Balthazar hadn’t really been fine ever since that incident with Polychronos and the grenade-thingy._

_And that bruise on Balthazar’s elbow looked really, really bad._

_Vinnie had sat in the waiting room for what felt like an eternity, trying to keep his mind occupied with magazines that were ancient even for the year 2027, idly drumming his fingers and people-watching.  An old man solved a crossword puzzle in the newspaper.  A teenager with a bunch of papers crammed into a math book did homework problems.  A stray toddler played with one of those toys that looked like a drunk abacus, with the beads and wires twisted at funny angles, that seemed to be a staple of doctors’ office waiting rooms in any era._

_All of them were calm, just waiting for something benign like a vaccine or a sports physical or a renewed prescription.  Surely whatever was wrong with Balthazar was likewise minor.  Vinnie was just overprotective.  As much as he gave Balthazar a hard time for being a worrywart, he knew he wasn’t really any better._

_Balthazar would emerge at any moment, and they could go home, fill him with fluids, and sleep the rest of the day away._

_Balthazar did emerge, but it was obvious from his face that their itinerary was about to change drastically._

_The diagnosis was bad.  The prognosis was worse.  But what was torture was spending those last few hours at home, gathering Balthazar’s things, killing time until his three-o’-clock appointment with Dr. Beck.  It was cruelly wasteful to kill time when there might be so little of it left._

_Everything Balthazar would need for the hospital was neatly packed and ready to go by noon.  With nothing else to do to prepare, he sat down on the bed, leaned back, stared up at the ceiling._

_“It’s not as bad as they said,” Vinnie insisted, more for his own sake than for Balthazar’s.  “I already summoned one of the Bureau doctors.  They’ll know what to do.”_

_Balthazar nodded silently._

_“I mean… who ever heard of someone dying of leukemia in the year 2185?”_

_“We aren’t in 2185,” Balthazar pointed out._

_“Yeah, but we might as well be.  They’ll probably get Dr. Calvin or someone.  He knows what he’s doing.  And they caught it early.  That’s the key, right?”_

_“Vincent.”  Balthazar sat up.  “We still need to brace ourselves for the fact that we’re looking at some very outdated treatments for the time being.  I… I need to prepare.”_

_He stood and shuffled to the bathroom.  He picked up a razor that was next to the sink._

_He held it up to his mustache._

_“It’ll be easier to take it all off at once,” he explained, and Vinnie swallowed._

_But he helped Balthazar shave every last hair from his head.  After all, it would all grow back once the chemo was done._

_The only thing was, the chemo was never done._

_Balthazar hung in there for a while—three months—but the cancer was simply too virulent, too aggressive.  To eradicate it would’ve taken drugs far too powerful for Balthazar to survive._

_And so finally, he succumbed._

_After that, things just sort of happened to Vinnie.  The funeral.  The burial.  The counseling.  He didn’t plan any of it, but somehow it all got done.  Without Balthazar to take the lead, Vinnie felt like he was left wandering, with no sense of direction.  Mr. Block sent him a few busywork assignments, and he did complete them, but none of it meant anything anymore.  Most of the time, he just lay around, watching dumb stuff on TV, downing entire tubs of ice cream or boxes of cookies in one sitting._

_Balthazar wasn’t there to tell him to cut it out._

_Balthazar wasn’t there to tell him to do anything._

_He didn’t clean much, because every time he looked at a mop or a bar of soap, it seemed to shrivel and turn gray before his eyes.  Other stuff did that, too—teabags, top hats, pocket watches, violins, even their pets (neither of whom lived more than a few months after the fact anyway).  Anything that reminded Vinnie of Balthazar had lost its color, its flavor, the very essence of whatever it was._

_Eventually, he couldn’t bear it anymore.  He dropped out of the Bureau, but not before hijacking a time vehicle out of the shop.  He managed to skirt Brick, who tried throwing him every reason not to interfere with the outcome of their encounter, and was just about to go back in time to tear Polychronos a new one when three old friends talked him out of it.  For their sake, he complied._

_He really liked that Milo Murphy kid._

_But the Balthazar-shaped hole in Vinnie’s heart stayed right where it was, always begging to be filled, always requiring that Vinnie fill up his schedule with mindless tasks to keep himself as distracted as possible.  He became a janitor and took his job as seriously as Balthazar would’ve wanted him to, and over the years, his life rolled slowly forward._

_Until the day a new closet appeared in the school basement._

Balthazar could feel the blood drain from his face.  It was a full minute before he could bring himself to say anything at all to Vinnie.

“You mean… in your reality… it was I who died of cancer?”

Vinnie nodded.  “I… look, I’m sorry I overreacted to the bruise, right?  It’s just it brought back some bad memories.”

“But that makes no sense… it was you who grabbed the grenade…”

“Not in my reality.”  Vinnie plopped down on the bed, and Balthazar joined him.  “You were the hero, absorbing all that weird radiation.  I could only stand back and watch in horror.”

“See now, in my recollection, our positions were quite the opposite.  It’s as though we switched places.”  It occurred to Balthazar that he had just presented the perfect opportunity for an off-color joke on Vinnie’s part, but Vinnie was so lost in thought that he either didn’t notice or didn’t want to get off on a tangent.

“So let’s get this straight… we’re from two alternate timelines.  In mine, you save the world but die a horrible death because of it, and in yours, I save the world but die a horrible death because of it.”  Vinnie drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.  “In mine, I went crazy and tried to use time travel to rescue you… but you haven’t done anything that drastic, right?  Because you’re level-headed and I’m the joker and… no?”

Balthazar sighed.  “I didn’t get my hands on a time vehicle, no.  I just… attempted to use an ancient Babylonian resurrection spell to raise you from the dead.”

“Wait, you mean the one Agent Chesapeake and I went back to stop?”

“I was desperate!” cried Balthazar defensively.

“No no no, I get that.  It’s just… dangit, that occurred to me, but I figured there was no way Chessie hadn’t sold her half by now, it had to be worth a lot.  That would’ve been so much easier…”

“Well, it’s all for the better,” Balthazar mused.  “If I weren’t dead in your reality, then you’d probably be in much more of a hurry to leave this one.”

“Hold it… this _is_ my reality!”

“No, I’m quite sure it’s mine.  That’s… that’s why I wanted to get away this weekend, to avoid giving it away,” Balthazar confessed.

“But not giving it away was why I agreed to come!”  Vinnie placed a hand on Balthazar’s knee.  “I thought for sure, when we got back from the school and saw my rabbit, you would notice something was off.  I didn’t want to stick around long enough for you to notice anything else.”

“But Caramel is _my_ rabbit.”

Vinnie shook his head in wonder.  “So even in separate realities, we both went to the same animal shelter, picked out the same rabbit, and gave her the same name?”  He laughed slightly.  “I guess it was meant to be, then.”

“What _are_ the odds?”  Balthazar crossed his legs pretzel-style.

“So what’s our next move, then?”  Vinnie lay back.  “Do we have to figure out which reality this is?”

“If we do, does one of us have to go home?”

“I don’t think so.  At least, I hope not.  Besides… is that even possible?  I don’t know about you, but whatever that place with all those threads was, I’d really rather not cross it again.”

“Definitely not.”  Clearly, one of them had crossed it already in order to enter the other’s reality, and Balthazar really didn’t think it had been himself, but obviously Vinnie didn’t think himself to have done so either.

“So one way or another, we’re staying put.”  Vinnie rolled over to face Balthazar.  “I like this plan.  But… I’d still like to know.  Are you okay with figuring it out once we get home?”

Balthazar leaned over and kissed Vinnie.  He tasted so sweet, so comforting, even after all these years.  “Of course,” he promised.

 

 

Vinnie’s request hadn’t been a difficult one.  After all, it was only a matter of time before someone they knew saw the person who had supposedly died and freaked out.  It seemed a rather uncharitable litmus test, but it would answer their question, and then they would be able to explain their unusual situation to the startled party.

Right?

They flew back to Swamp City, picked up Caramel from the kennel, and returned home, all without encountering a single person they knew.  Balthazar hadn’t considered it before, but having isolated himself for so many years wasn’t exactly proving helpful.  But in his defense, Vinnie apparently hadn’t maintained much of a social circle either.

Well, they could try again tomorrow, maybe when they showed up at work and the school didn’t recognize one of them.

Or maybe the answer would reach them sooner than that.

“Mail!” Vinnie exclaimed as he sifted through a stack of letters and magazines.

“Yes, it… it does tend to pile up when you’ve been gone for a few days.”  Balthazar reached out and took half the stack.

“Yeah, but only one of us has been gone for a few _days_ ,” Vinnie pointed out.  “All we gotta do is check the names!”

“Vinnie, you’re a brilliant man!”

“Let’s see… ‘current resident’.  Well, that doesn’t help.”  Vinnie tossed the sales flyer over his head; Balthazar didn’t even care that it was now lying on the floor.

“‘Mr. Cavendish-Drowssap’,” Balthazar read from an envelope that looked like a bill.

“Could be either of us.”  It was true; ‘Cavendish-Drowssap’ was the name they had agreed to both take upon marriage.

“No name, but this looks like mine.”  Vinnie shamelessly pulled a risqué magazine out of the pile and held it up.

Balthazar blushed.  “Erm.  Well.”

Vinnie smirked.  “Oh.  You read it for the articles, right?”

“Let’s move on!”  Balthazar picked up a piece of junk mail.  “Another ‘current resident’.”

“Another ‘Mr. Cavendish-Drowssap’.”

Finally, Balthazar found an envelope that looked promising.  It was a holiday-green color, with Milo and Amanda’s return address in the upper-left corner.  It was nearing time for their annual Christmas party, now that Balthazar thought about it.  They had thrown one every year for the past four years, and as painful as it had been, Balthazar had always made the effort to attend.  And as it had been for the last four years, the addressee’s name had been written in Amanda’s neat cursive script: “Balthazar Cavendish-Drowssap.”

“It looks like we have our answer,” Balthazar told his partner, not triumphantly as he would’ve thought given that he was just proven right.

“I’m… I’m not sure that we do.”

Vinnie held up another green envelope, identical in every respect except for one detail: “Vincent Cavendish-Drowssap.”

“This might be more complicated than we thought."


	5. Entanglement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, sorry this took so long, but between it being longer, me working overtime, and the glorious phenomenon that was this week's episodes, I've been busy.  
> Some of this stuff is a little harder to reconcile with canon now, thanks to various revelations, but I think it can still be done.  
> I may have paused for some domestic fluff amongst the trio and their wives, but I don't think I drove the story too far off-course.  
> Hope y'all like it.

The next several weeks yielded nothing conclusive in their attempt to determine whose universe they inhabited.

The school recognized both of them as janitors.  Mail arrived addressed to both Vinnie and Balthazar, but never to both at once.  The people at the doughnut shop would greet both Balthazar and Vinnie with a cheerful smile every Friday as they showed up to buy a dozen.  Mr. Phillips yelled at both of them every chance he got.  It never seemed to occur to him that either one of them had actually died.

“Perhaps we didn’t?” Balthazar hypothesized over a leisurely breakfast one Saturday morning.  “Could we have entered a third reality where we’re both still alive?”

“Maybe.”  Vinnie dumped four spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee.  “But then how come we haven’t met ourselves by now?”

“Perhaps our alternate selves grew fed up with the Bureau and ran away to some remote cabin to live the remainder of their days off the grid?”

Vinnie smiled.  “Hey, that sounds fun, I’d be down.  But then why’d they leave Caramel?”

He had a point.

“Also, we’re apparently both still janitors in this reality.”

Balthazar spread cream cheese on a bagel.  “I guess that would make that possibility unlikely.”

Vinnie dunked a doughnut into his coffee.  “Or we could both be dead in this reality.  Like we got into a car crash or something.  And nobody’s noticed yet.”

Balthazar stared into space and noticed one telltale detail on the wall.  “No, it appears that you died long ago.”  He stood up and walked to the ding in the drywall, tracing it with his finger.  “This mark wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t lost my temper.  And I wouldn’t have lost my temper if I hadn’t lost you.”

Vinnie frowned.  “So what, you think our realities just… tied back together somehow?”

“But how would that even work?”  Balthazar drummed his fingers against the wall.  “I should think that the only way to un-split our realities would be to go back and prevent the event that caused them to diverge in the first place.  Seeing as neither of us has done so, and it would likely just create a third reality anyway, I don’t believe that to be possible.”

“We’re going to need more details,” Vinnie declared.  “It would help us narrow things down.  We’ll need to ask people what they know.”

“But nobody else seems to have noticed anything.”

“Because they aren’t time travelers.  This whole reality thing is probably more than they could handle.  But we know at least one other time traveler who might be able to help.”

Balthazar paused, then nodded.  He’d been dreading contact lest he be accused of trying to raise the dead again, but there were few others who would even understand their unusual situation.  If anybody had any workable theories, it was the boy.

Besides, Milo had made it a priority to help the time travelers whenever possible.

“Their Christmas gathering is soon upon us,” Balthazar noted.  “I suppose it is high time we paid him a visit.”

 

 

They stood at the doorway and rang the bell.

“How do I look?”  Vinnie tossed his scarf around his neck with one hand whilst clutching a plate piled high with cookies in the other.  They had received separate requests from Amanda that they bring cutout sugar cookies, which seemed odd, but possibly related to this whole reality weirdness.  Just in case, they had made a double batch.

“Exactly like me, dear,” Balthazar replied as he shifted the bag full of presents to the other shoulder.  It was true, too.  They both wore red Santa hats, and their sweaters were identical, hand-knit pieces with light green and dark green stripes.  Both recalled having been given them by Gretchen, Zack’s wife, the previous year, and the red-and-white zigzag scarves the year before that.

Vinnie grinned.  “In that case, super sexy.”  He batted his eyelashes flirtatiously.

“Will you tone it down in front of the children?”

“They haven’t answered—”

But Vinnie didn’t get to finish before the door was, in fact, answered by a six-year-old Kyle Murphy, who didn’t let the sling that contained his right arm stop him from grabbing Balthazar into a firm hug.  “Uncle Balthy!  And Uncle Vinnie, too!”  He called over his shoulder, “Uncle Balthy and Uncle Vinnie are here!”

“That’s great!” Amanda called from the kitchen.  “Show them to the den where the party is!”

Kyle beckoned for them to follow him as he skipped down the hallway, at the end of which the Murphys had set up a beautiful Christmas tree with no breakable ornaments, a fire extinguisher right next to the log that burned merrily in the fireplace, and a garland of green and red construction paper loops.  As they entered the rec room, they were swarmed by four-year-old Dana Murphy, three-year-old Jean Murphy, and five-year-old Danny Valdez, a foster child whom Zack and Gretchen were in the process of officially adopting.  Too embarrassed to show physical affection at his age, Tony, Danny’s ten-year-old brother, hung back on the couch.  He still acknowledged their presence with a slight wave.  Melissa, Uheri, and Zack looked up from their eggnog, and Gretchen set aside her knitting needles for a second to pick up the carton and offer some to Balthazar and Vinnie.

So far, nobody had noticed anything amiss.

Vinnie knelt down to hug the children in return.  “It’s so great to see all of you!  I heard someone’s been getting visits from the tooth fairy lately!”

Kyle grinned, revealing his missing front teeth.

Dana pointed at Balthazar’s sack.  “Are there sharks in there?” she asked hopefully, clutching a stuffed Great White to her chest.

“Did this kid have the same obsession in your reality?” Vinnie whispered to Balthazar.

“Very much so.  The last time I watched her, we must have gone through that blasted picture book a dozen times!”

“Looks like Dana’s love for sharks transcends time and space,” Vinnie chuckled.  He turned back to the girl.  “You’ll just have to see for yourself, when it’s time to open presents.  But not before!” he warned.

She nodded solemnly.

Milo and Amanda entered the room, Milo practically pushing his wife, who protested, “Someone needs to take the pie out of the oven!”

“Someone will,” he promised, “but that someone is not you.  You’ve been on your feet all morning.  It’s Christmas.  Relax!  I’ll get it!”

“Leaving you alone in the kitchen is not very relaxing,” Amanda only half-joked.

“It’s okay, Uheri and I are on it,” Melissa said, getting up.  “And while we’re at it, we might as well break out a fresh carton of eggnog… the _good_ eggnog.”

Uheri grinned.  “Do we have to share it?”

“Not if nobody else stakes their claim!”

Vinnie downed his glass to make room for the alcoholic version of the beverage.  “Better hit up Balthy and me!”

“Ditto here,” Zack added.  “Gretchen, hon, you want any?”

“Sure,” she said, not even looking up from her knitting.  Her needles flew so quickly, it was no wonder her handknit llama-wool sweaters were supplying the Underwoods with a substantial portion of their income.

“Milo?  Amanda?”

Milo looked over at Amanda hesitantly.  She smiled at him.  “Go ahead.  Enjoy yourself.”

“But it’s not really fair if you can’t have any.”

Melissa froze.  “Wait.  Amanda… ‘can’t have any’?” she repeated suspiciously.

“Dude.  You guys aren’t… you are?  Again?” Zack asked incredulously as the couple hugged each other and nodded affirmatively.

“Just found out, still on the DL… but yeah.”

Zack stared between the two of them.  “Okay, man, so I know it’s none of my business… but the way Murphy’s Law works… did you... I mean, was this…?”

Milo laughed.  “No accident.  Promise.”

“Still hoping for another girl,” Amanda admitted.  Uheri walked over and gave her a hug.

“There’s always hope,” she assured Amanda.

Gretchen pushed her glasses up her nose.  “I’m not sure how much more Murphy’s Law your family can take!”

“Well… so far we seem to be getting along fine,” Milo said just as a garland snapped, making it rain plastic baubles on the far side of the room.

“I’ll get it!” Vinnie volunteered, and Balthazar joined him as he went to pick up the scattered globes.

“They all seem so… _happy_ ,” Balthazar whispered to Vinnie as Melissa slapped Milo a high-five.

“Yeah.  For the most part, things have been going pretty well for them.  I’ve kind of been jealous these last five years.  But it’s also what got me through some of the really bad days,” Vinnie explained.

“Just… just how bad?” Balthazar asked nervously.  If they were even a fraction as bad as what Balthazar remembered, the sheer horror of what could have happened made him want to grab Vinnie’s arm and never let go.

“Pretty bad,” Vinnie admitted.  “But seeing the kids happy… I couldn’t ruin their lives by making them worry about me, you know?”

“I do know, all too well.  A vicarious sort of happiness from being around them is still happiness, and certainly better than despair.  I just… well, now that we’re together again, I want to have a lot more than ten more years to make our own happiness.  And yet we aren’t guaranteed another day, not in the least.”

Vinnie placed a hand on Balthazar’s shoulder and pointed up with the other hand.  “All the more reason to enjoy this day.  Look where we’re standing.”

Mistletoe.

Dash it all, Balthazar was going to beat Dakota to the punch this time.  He grabbed the back of his husband’s head and leaned in, fast, furious, practically knocking Vinnie’s teeth out with his own.  But he wasn’t about to let a little clumsiness ruin this.  He opened his mouth wider, deepening the kiss, when—

“Uncle Balthy?  Uncle Vinnie???”

They turned to their left to see five pairs of innocent eyes staring at them.

“You guys are like… a _thing_?” Tony asked.

“I didn’t know you even knew each other!” Kyle insisted.

“Of course we bloody well know each other!”

“In the biblical sense,” Vinnie added with a wink.

“Are you marrying him?” little Jean piped up.  “In the movie when the prince kissed the princess they… they gotted married!

“Sweetie, they’re already married,” Milo explained to his daughter.  “Have been for a long time.  Longer than Mommy and me.”

Danny frowned in confusion.  “Then why is this the first time we’ve seen them together?”

Balthazar’s breath caught.  This might be it.  They might finally be nearing an answer to resolve his and Vinnie’s confusion.  The kids remembered Balthazar.  The kids remembered Vinnie.  But the kids did not remember Balthazar _and_ Vinnie.  Some of the kids hadn’t even existed yet when Vinnie died, or didn’t die, as the case may be.  Their minds wouldn’t automatically associate the couple the way their parents would.  Perhaps talking to them would yield some clues as to what was going on.

“Dana, my sweet girl,” Balthazar asked, kneeling to look her in the eye.  “That stuffed shark you’re carrying… you received it for your birthday, did you not?”

Dana nodded as she squeezed the toy.

“Do you remember who gave it to you?”

“Uncle Vinnie,” she said simply.  Except, Balthazar remembered having picked it out himself.

“Nuh-uh, you got it from Uncle Balthy,” Kyle corrected her.  “Uncle Vinnie gave me the remote-control velociraptor for _my_ birthday.”

Danny scratched his head.  “I thought you got that toy from your Uncle Balthazar.”

“Uncle Balthy,” Dana changed her answer.  “No… Uncle Vinnie… Uncle Balthy… Uncle Vinnie.”  The poor child looked panicked for a moment, as though she were about to get in trouble for lying.

“Um… guys?” Melissa asked hesitantly.  “What’s going on here?”

Balthazar sighed.  “There was a matter of which we meant to inquire of you,” he told her, “but perhaps it is best not discussed in front of your children.”

“Tony, you keep an eye on the others for a bit.  We’ll be in the other room,” Zack instructed his older son, who rolled his eyes but did as he was told.

 

 

All eight of the adults present crowded into the kitchen.

There were only two chairs at the island, and Milo immediately insisted that Amanda occupy one of them.  Everyone else stared awkwardly at the remaining chair, until Gretchen took one for the team and sat down.

Silence fell over the room, and Balthazar and Vinnie exchanged looks, each unsure how to start.  Finally, Balthazar exhaled and asked, “What do you remember of the past five years?  About Vinnie and myself, specifically?”

“I remember you being a basket case and us having to talk you out of using ancient dark magic to resurrect Vinnie a year after he passed,” Melissa answered bluntly.

Zack’s jaw dropped.

“And I remember having to stop Vinnie from trying to single-handedly fight a dangerous interdimensional being to stop you from dying,” Milo recalled.  He frowned.  “But wait a minute… we talked to Balthazar after Vinnie died.”

“How could we have comforted Balthazar after Vinnie died if we also had to comfort Vinnie after Balthazar died?” Melissa pondered, scratching her head.

“Guys.”  Zack found his voice, and it was much more high-pitched than usual.  “You’re missing the biggest thing.  How are you both cool with the fact that both Vinnie and Balthazar are dead, but we’re standing here, right now, talking to them?”

“Good question,” Milo answered.  “I’m assuming time travel is involved, naturally?”

Balthazar shook his head.  “Not in this case.  Remember, neither of us is any longer a Bureau employee.”

“Ah.  Good point.”

“What we wanna know,” Vinnie said, “is which reality we’re in.  I remember Balthazar dying, and Balthazar remembers me dying, and we were hoping you might be able to help clear that up by seeing what you remembered.”

“I… remember both…” Milo admitted.  “And so, it seems, does everyone else.  Can memories jump between realities, too?”

“Maybe, if the people involved did some time traveling themselves,” Cavendish mused.

“But we haven’t.  Not without you guys.”

“So we need concrete evidence, something from this reality that proves it’s mine… or his.”

“The funerals!” Amanda said suddenly.  Everyone turned to look at her.  “After Balthazar died, I remember Milo asking me to organize the funeral because Vinnie was too stressed to do it.  And… and after Vinnie died, Milo asked me to do the same for Balthazar.”  She paused and looked down.  “I… I have records.  Let me go get my planner from that year.”

Milo shook his head.  “I’ll get it!”

He dashed out of the room.  Several crashes, the sound of something breaking, a whale song, and a lot of thudding later, he returned, clutching a pink notebook with orange flowers on it.

He flipped to that fateful date.

“Here it is,” he said, opening it to the page that chronicled that bitter day, when Vinnie had been lain to rest.

“Well then… it looks as though the matter is resolved!” Balthazar declared.

“Not so fast,” Vinnie argued, then flipped to a page that was a few weeks later.  “Here we go.  _That_ was when you died.”

And there it was, plain as day… the date, location, and time of Balthazar’s own funeral.

“But it happened earlier than that,” Balthazar protested.

“Wait wait wait, so we both got sick, but I died faster?”  Vinnie sounded a little disappointed, as though Balthazar had defeated him in a chess match.

“I… I didn’t take you to the hospital as soon as you evidently took me,” Balthazar confessed guiltily.  Would that have made a difference?

“Again, still ignoring the fact that you’re _both_ dead!” Zack said.

“And both are recorded in my planner.  And my planner is never wrong!” Amanda stated adamantly.  She reached into a drawer and whipped out this year’s agenda, opening it to the page where, last March, Balthazar remembered the Murphys taking him out to one of Vinnie’s favorite delis at 6:00 p.m. to help him stomach not having Vinnie around on their wedding anniversary.  This was likewise recorded in the book.

But so was them taking Vinnie to Balthazar’s favorite tea shop, also at 6:00 p.m.

“And I _never_ double-book!”

Gretchen shuddered.  “Something fishy is going on.”  Uheri nodded in agreement.

“Something indeed,” a familiar voice echoed from above them, and that was when a portal opened up in the Murphys’ ceiling.

 

 

The man who dropped down into the kitchen could have been Milo’s twin—same height, same build, same brown hair, same bright eyes, same sweater-vest—except that his skin was a few shades darker and he carried a different backpack.

“Milo Murphy… the first!” the man exclaimed, rushing over to hug his double, who reciprocated.  “I’m Milo Murphy the sixth!  Great to meet you!”  He turned to Amanda.  “And if my calculations are correct… that’s Milo Murphy the second!”  He pointed to her stomach.

“Great… another boy…”  Amanda ran a hand through her hair.

Milo-the-Sixth turned back to his ancestor.  “It’s an honor to meet the first time traveler in the Murphy line!  But I guess you’ve figured out by now… you aren’t the last!”

“Does this mean Milo Junior’s going to go on time adventures too?” Milo-the-First asked with surprisingly little concern in his voice.

“The world had better hope so!”  Sixth chuckled.  “Otherwise, we might never see the Iberian Peninsula again!”

“How frightful!” Balthazar gasped.  He regretted having said anything the moment Sixth turned to him.

“Dr. Cavendish!” he cried.  “Or… I guess it’s ‘Mr.’ Cavendish at the moment.”

“Mr. Cavendish-Drowssap, actually.”

“Thank you for your heroic sacrifice in the Aborted Schism of 2027!  And same to you, Professor Dakota!”

“‘Professor’?”  Vinnie grinned.  “I like the sound of that!”

“Enough with the pleasantries, we’ve got bigger things to concern ourselves with!” Balthazar said impatiently.  “If you’re a time traveler, then how come we’ve never met you before?”  The Bureau wasn’t tiny, but it was small enough that if a man who looked so strikingly like Milo Murphy had worked there, Balthazar surely would have seen him at some point during the years of his involvement.

“Oh, I never said I was a time traveler,” Sixth corrected.  “I mean, I am, technically, but I never said that.  I’m not with the Bureau of Time Travel, if that’s what you mean.”

“A renegade?” Balthazar gasped.

Sixth shook his head.  “Nope.  My time travel privileges are perfectly legit.”

“But other than BTT employees, the only people authorized to time travel are…”

Sixth grinned slyly.  “Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation, at your service!”

“Hey nifty, maybe you can tell us what’s going on!” Vinnie suggested.  “It looks like we’re dealing with more than the normal continuum-paradox kinda stuff.”

“You are, and that’s precisely why I’m here!”  He paused.  “Well, I guess I have to explain what’s going on before I can explain _precisely_ why I’m here.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna need some context.”

“Happy to provide.”  Sixth noticed a plate of mini-quiches and reached for one, nearly knocking over the entire platter, but luckily Melissa foresaw the incident and caught the plate in time.  “Oops.”

“Still cursed?” Zack asked.

“I prefer to think of it more as a metaphysical predisposition to misfortune than as a ‘curse,’ really.”  Sixth popped the quiche into his mouth.  “But yeah, still got it.”

Vinnie frowned thoughtfully.  “You said a ‘metaphysical predisposition’,” he repeated.  “That makes it sound inevitable.”

“Pretty much.”

Melissa caught on to what Vinnie was getting at.  “But now that we’ve established that alternate realities are a thing… how can we really say that anything is ‘inevitable’?”

“Well…”  Sixth rubbed the back of his head.  “Because alternate realities are less of ‘a thing’ than current circumstances would imply.”

“You mean to say that the universe does not split into alternate paths at the crux of every decision?” Balthazar asked.

“Not usually.  And you should be very glad it doesn’t.  You know how they say nature abhors a vacuum?  Well… it abhors a fissured universe even more.  When the universe splits, it becomes weaker, and eventually it won’t hold up anymore.”

“Wait a sec, I’m confused,” Zack said.  “How is it safe to go back and change the past, if alternate realities are a bad thing?”

Sixth bit his lip.  “I know I’ve got a good visual aide in here somewhere,” he said, pulling off his backpack and rummaging around.  He pulled out a wide array of instruments, some of them recognizable (to Vinnie and Balthazar, at least), most of them not.  “Or… maybe I don’t.”  He looked up and rested his eyes on a skein of gray yarn Gretchen had out.  “Can I borrow this?”

She nodded.

“So this is the time stream.”  Sixth pulled the end of the yarn to unravel the ball a little bit.  “It keeps going, and going, all in one uniform path.  It might twist, or bend, but it’s still a single continuity.  Now, if you don’t like where it’s going…”  He made a loop in the string.  “…you can travel backwards and change something about the stream.  Now it’s not going the same way it was, but it’s still all one stream, with one outcome, and whatever happened that made you want to go back and change it is part of this loop.  No splitting here.”

“Okay,” Vinnie said slowly.

“Splitting is something different.  It takes more than just a time machine to do it.”  Sixth took the end of the yarn and yanked the fibers apart.  “But if you manage it, then everything after the split becomes thinner… weaker.  Most of you probably don’t remember it, now that I’ve done my best to rejoin the universes after the fork, but I’m willing to bet real money that those who are only able to remember one side noticed something off about anything to do with the other half.  Maybe you weren’t able to see things that were related to your partner, or maybe it was a high-pitched noise whenever you got too close… I don’t know the particulars, but since you two were essentially perched on the edge of a fractured universe, I can see how you might have gotten disoriented.”

“Disoriented is one way to put it, I suppose.”  Balthazar shuffled closer to his partner and reached for his hand.

“You should be relieved that, thanks to your sacrifices, the universe _only_ unraveled into two,” Sixth said gravely.  “One where Dr. Cavendish died, and one where Professor Dakota died.  By absorbing the shock of the ignition mechanism, you were able to prevent the release of the device’s full power.  I’m talking billions, possibly trillions, of splits across the world all at one moment, leaving every possible route highly vulnerable.”

“But why did it have to be a bloody human being to absorb the shock?” Balthazar asked.

“Yeah I mean… you couldn’t have, I dunno, dropped a blanket over the whole works or something?”

Sixth sighed.  “Because the device works by dividing the universe according to volitional outcomes.  That is, had the device gone off, a separate offshoot of our universe would have been formed according to every possible choice any human being could have made in that moment.  It took a being with free will, who could determine the direction of the universe, to decide not to let it fray like that.  It had to be a human.”  Sixth put a hand to his chin.  “Or a dryad, or a vampire, or an alien, I guess.  The point is, free will.  And it worked… mostly.  That’s why I had to tie the two timelines back together.”

“That was you,” Balthazar breathed.  “You made sure Vinnie and I found each other again.”

Sixth nodded.  “In order for it to work, I had to transfer you both to a superspacial realm at exactly the same time, and to do that, you had to simultaneously physically occupy the same location in geometric space.  Well, there’s a weak spot located just underneath Jefferson County Middle School that would have been very easy to open using correctly placed discarded BTT devices—long story—and all I had to do was ensure that you both found the spot at the same time.  Hence, I opened a closet, put the neutralizing agent inside, and staged a chemical spill.  That last one didn’t really require much effort,” he admitted.

“And that place, with all the weird string everywhere… that was the superspacial realm?” Vinnie asked.  Balthazar was amazed at how his husband figured that out so much faster than he had, although after fifteen years, he really shouldn’t have been.  “And all Balthy and I had to do to bring the universes back together was… kiss?”

Sixth smiled.  “Well, any touch would have sufficed,” he corrected.  “But however the contact happened, the moment you did, you united your universes once more, thus enabling them to tie back together.”

“So then the world is saved?” Balthazar asked.

Sixth looked down.  “I was hoping it would be.  But we’re still seeing evidence that Polychronos is milking the universe in the five-year period between the schism and the repair.  And if he sucks it dry, it could easily snap, orphaning the rest of the time stream and causing it to die.”

“Wait, so who’s Polychronos?” Gretchen asked.

“The guy who killed Dakota and/or Cavendish,” Zack explained.

“Child… he has done _far_ worse than that,” someone called from the ceiling.  Somehow Balthazar hadn’t noticed before—and evidently the others hadn’t either—that the portal through which Milo-the-Sixth had emerged was still open.

Agents Brick and Savannah dropped down, landing expertly on their feet.

“And that,” Brick said through gritted teeth, reluctantly, “is why we need you.”

 

 

Silence flooded the kitchen for a second, until Melissa said to Zack, “Aren’t those the Certified Public Accountants who chased us into the sewer when we were kids?”

“Let me get this straight,” Vinnie said.  “You.  Need.  _Us_?”

Savannah crossed her arms.  “Can we not—?”

“No, no, let’s hear you say that again.”  Balthazar couldn’t resist the temptation.

“Fine, we need you,” Savannah humored him.

Vinnie shook his head.  “No, Brick has to say it.  He’s the one who tried to stop me from going back to stop Polychronos before!”

“I thought the children did that?”

“Yeah, they talked me out of it, because I didn’t actually have a plan and would’ve gotten myself killed several times over.  But Brick told me that under no circumstances, no matter how prepared I was, was I to use time-travel to save Balthazar, and well, I’d hate to defy orders!”

Brick clenched his fist.  “There’s no time for this.”

“Then just say it and let’s get this over with,” Savannah told him.

“But—”

“ _Now_ ,” she hissed.

“Fine.  We need your help to go back in time and stop Polychronos,” Brick muttered.

Vinnie punched the air in victory.

“This isn’t a game!”  Savannah snapped.

“She’s… she’s right about that,” Sixth said.  “The dangers Polychronos poses are very real.  I can explain on the way, if you like.”

“Now?” Melissa asked.

“Yes.  We’ll be needing Cavendish and Dakota and… well, Milo-the-First has time travel experience and a backpack full of different gadgets, so he might be useful.  You coming?” he asked his great-great-great-grandfather.

“Sure!” First agreed.  “What could go wrong?”

“Everything,” Amanda protested.

Milo-the-First kissed his wife.  “Anything… but not everything.  We’ll be back in a jiffy.”

Vinnie smiled.  “We’ll be back in time to see the look on Dana’s face when she opens the Megalodon Mania board game we got her,” he promised.


	6. Fulfillment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, looks like I'm done.  
> So I was up late writing this chapter, and the part of me that would likely prevail were I fully awake is telling me I should wait until I'm all here mentally and can edit this properly before sending it out.  
> But as it happens, I am NOT fully awake, and that part of my brain will simply have to suffer.  
> Besides, I can always edit it later...

The portal deposited them into a round, posh room via another ceiling.

There was soft, red carpet, and high-backed chairs with ornate carvings in what looked like mahogany wood.  The windows covered the entirety of the walls, creating mosaics with irregularly shaped panes, almost like stained glass, except perfectly transparent.  Through those windows, the world, no, the universe, whizzed past them at an incalculable speed.

“Dang, this really puts the old limo to shame!” Vinnie exclaimed as he plopped down into a chair and put his feet up on a table with a fancy, embroidered runner.  Brick and Savannah both cringed, but the Milos didn’t even notice.

“Is this your time vehicle?” Balthazar asked.

“Of sorts,” Sixth told him.

“It traverses far more than space and time,” Savannah explained.  “Its reach encompasses the entire realm of that which exists—in our universe and in others alike.”

“It’s a much more comfortable view from in here,” Sixth said.  “We get to see everything.  Look, there you are!”  Although the image flashed by quickly, Balthazar could somehow recall every detail.

A long, gray tube had forked in front of them, sending each arm spiraling in random directions, until at one point they merged back together.  And at that point, two dots—one bright yellow, one dark green—hung from gray threads that met somewhere in the middle.

“The kiss,” Balthazar breathed.  “Milo, my dear boy, where are we?”

“Outside of space, time, and the universe itself,” Sixth declared.  “Look, there’s another universe over there!”  It was another tube, this one navy blue instead of gray.  “And another!”  This one was much thicker and a curious fuchsia color.  “And a… ’nother,” he said mournfully, at the sight of a white universe that split into many strands that eventually tapered off into nonexistence.

“So _this_ is what the Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation gets to do?” Vinnie asked, his voice deliberately optimistic, but betraying that tiny streak of sorrow that only Balthazar had learned to pick up about halfway through their marriage.

Sixth grinned.  “Pretty nifty, am I right?”

“I’ll say!” Milo-the-First agreed.  “I’ve never traveled like this!”

“Hopefully you won’t need to for much longer,” Savannah sighed.

“Hey, what are you doing here, anyway?” Vinnie asked her.  “I mean, I know Brick got promoted into the BCM, but—”

“In my reality, it was the other way around,” Balthazar explained.

“It was the realization that we had two sets of very different memories that first alerted Brick and me to the possibility of a timeline that had been fused back together,” Savannah said.  “We both had memories of our past five years with Cosmic Manipulation, but we also retained memories of staying with Time Travel.  So we inquired of our superiors—”

“And they weren’t much help!” Sixth interjected.

“Damn ‘need-to-know’ clauses and all that,” Brick said.

“Luckily, I decided they needed to know!”  Sixth casually hit a button on a remote that must have been the ship’s control pad.  “And… I kind of needed them to know as well.”

“How do you mean?” Balthazar asked.

“I mean… for this mission I figured I’d need the agents who were assigned to stop Polychronos from splitting the universe in the first place.  And that it would be best if my superiors didn’t know that your reunion wasn’t quite enough to keep the realities stabilized.”  Sixth sighed.  “Polychronos is shrewder than we thought.”

“Yeah, what was it you said he did again?  ‘Sucking the universe dry’?”  Vinnie put his feet down and sat up straighter.  “How exactly does he do that?”

“Wish we knew,” Savannah said.  “If we knew for sure, then we could stop him for good.  But for the time being, all we can really do is keep our timeline from becoming vulnerable.”

“What’ll happen if we don’t?”

A parade of thin, translucent threads floated by the window just then.  Disconnected, directionless, drifting.

“Woah.”  Vinnie’s eyes widened.  “Is that another universe?”

“It is,” Brick affirmed.  “Shredded to pieces by our nemesis.”

“It was a good universe, too!” Sixth lamented.  “Populated entirely by sentient yo-yos!”

“Yo-yos?” Balthazar inquired.

Milo-the-First shrugged.  “I guess universes don’t have to make sense to people who don’t live in them.  But… well, if anybody lived there, then being shredded to pieces sounds really sad.”

“It’s a tragedy, and it’s not the only one,” Savannah said levelly.  “And they all started the same way—with a compromised time stream.”

“And except for one, they all started with one of Polychronos’ grenades.  They really pack a punch,” Sixth said.  “Don’t ask us about the one… we think it’s where he got the idea, but that’s all we know about the first shredded universe.”

“Shredded universes,” Balthazar echoed.  “How dreadful.  Why would Polychronos do such a thing?”

“Power,” Brick said simply.  “The Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation was working on a prototype meant to secure unlimited energy by tapping universes that were completely uninhabited.  Not to split them or anything like that, just to harness the vast kinetic energy that procures stars and sets galaxies in motion.”

“But it turns out that the most efficient way to take energy from a universe is to destroy it entirely.  And Polychronos was in charge of the project, so he found that out first-hand.”

“At first we thought nothing of it,” Savannah elaborated.  “It was… brutal, but the only universes he was destroying were, like we said, uninhabited.  Or so we thought.  And soon we learned that he was hoarding most of the energy he was procuring, to use for his own purposes.  Well, that’s still theft, so naturally he was fired.  And in response, he drained a neighboring universe with which we had just recently established contact, costing us a potentially valuable alliance.”

“And destroying every last scrap of life in it.”  Sixth closed his eyes.

“We thought he just did it to send a message,” Brick said.  “To leave him alone.  And like cowardly idiots… we did.  Well, the Bureau did.  Murphy, Savannah, and I were never consulted on the matter!”

“Lemme guess… instead of stopping, he just kept eating universes left and right and gaining power.”  If there had been popcorn available, Balthazar could imagine Vinnie stuffing his face full of it after making his point.

“And now his intent is to consume ours as well,” Savannah affirmed.

“Would that not erase him from ever having been born?” Balthazar asked.

“He’s unstable,” Savannah explained.  “It seems like with every universe he drains, he grows more…”

“Psychotic,” Brick finished for her.  “He’s not thinking straight anymore.  Screw him, but if we don’t stop him, we won’t exist either.”

“That seems like a pretty reasonable motivation,” Vinnie acknowledged.  “So how do we stop him?”

“ _You_ don’t,” Brick answered.  “The rest of us have been trained to use technologies you two couldn’t even pronounce.  Well, the rest of us except for you,” he amended as he looked over at Milo-the-First.  “We’re humoring Milo the Sixth by bringing you along.  Anyway, if any of our weapons can stop Polychronos, we’ll do exactly that.”

“But the odds of that are… well, they’re unpredictable,” Sixth said as he started to type something into a wrist-cuff he was wearing, then gave up.

“So you need a plan B,” Milo-the-First finished.

Sixth nodded.  “That’s where Doctor Cavendish and Professor Dakota come in.  Your objective is to hijack the initial ignition of the grenade.  You’re the only ones who were there at the time, and likely the only ones who even know what it looks like.  If anyone can stop it, it’s you.”

“Stop it,” Vinnie repeated.  “We stopped it last time!”

“And look how well that turned out,” Balthazar said.  “But perhaps… if we were to get to it sooner…”

“We could turn it off before it even released the radiation.”  Vinnie folded his hands.  “Then neither of us dies, the universe doesn’t split, and we get those five years… back.  Together.”

He stared at Balthazar, who stared back.  Five years.  Five years where his memories wouldn’t be filled with long, lonely days; nights spent sobbing into the covers; dark hours spent fighting those… thoughts… that occurred to him now and again; or months devoted to attempting to resurrect his deceased husband.  No, instead they would be able to remember five years’ worth of Christmases together, five years of anniversaries and birthdays, five years of playing cards in the evenings and quarreling over where to eat dinner and making love in the back of that stupid time car.

Even if the others took down Polychronos with the first hit and saved the multiverse instantly, Balthazar realized that he and Vinnie would still have to go back.  They would fight for the life they could have had together.

They would win.

 

 

The Cosmic Manipulators came to the abandoned complex where it had happened all those years ago, when it had happened all those years ago, and dropped off Balthazar and Vinnie.  Literally.

“Would it have killed them to be gentler?” Balthazar grumbled as he hit the concrete after they tumbled out of the portal.  He stood up and dusted himself off.

“They dropped us off at eleven in the morning,” Vinnie said.  “The grenade went off at one.”

“So we’ve got two hours to find the blasted thing.”  Balthazar turned around to get his bearings.  “Apparently the assumption is that Polychronos isn’t carrying it in his back pocket.”

“He probably isn’t.”  Vinnie authoritatively strode towards a two-story building with bars over the windows, and Balthazar followed.  “Think about it.  That radiation gave us both cancer and we died, and that was just the ignition.  If he, I dunno, slipped on a banana peel and landed on it, maybe he’d be killed on the spot.”  He pried open a rusty door, grunting as he did so.

“Point taken,” Balthazar allowed.  “But in that case, what reason do we have to assume he’s storing it here at all?”

Instead of answering, Vinnie turned left, marched through some sort of laboratory, and opened a door on the opposite end.

And there it was.

“I… I spent a lot of time studying the layout of this place when I was still scheming to take him down,” Vinnie confessed.  He reached for the grenade, but Balthazar quickly slapped his hand away.

“Do be more cautious!” he insisted.  “Wear some gloves, at least!”

They found the gloves, and some goggles, and carefully transported the orb from its position in the closet to a laboratory table.  Vinnie grabbed a screwdriver and pulled open the casing.

“Have you any idea how this thing works?” Balthazar demanded.

“Some.  Enough to know I’m not about to blow the universe into smithereens.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Vinnie assured him as he uncoupled a pair of wires, and the room was bathed in a halo of blue light.

 

 

_“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!”_

Balthazar shook himself.  Why had he just repeated his former admonition?

He blinked.

Why were they standing in front of the closet again?  And why was the grenade still inside?

Vinnie grinned sheepishly.  “All right… maybe that wasn’t the right wire after all.”

“You could have been hurt!”

“All right, fine, I’ll be more careful this time.”  Vinnie reached for the grenade again, and Balthazar yanked him back again.

“Gloves.  On.”

Vinnie complied, then once more transported the object to the table, opened it up, reached for a wire…

_“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!”_

“Okay… not that one either.”  Vinnie suited up once more, opened the ball…

 _“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!_ Oh, for the love of—”  Balthazar was this close to telling Vinnie to forget the whole thing.  But no, Vinnie had to make another attempt.  And sure enough, as soon as he set it down…

_“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!”_

“Okay okay, I must’ve shaken something loose, I’ll be more careful this time.”  Vinnie picked up the grenade.

 _“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves_ , and how long is this going to keep up?”  Balthazar felt oddly pleased that he had managed to avoid repeating the entire phrase.

“I don’t know!  For all I know, this is how you disable it to begin with!”

“I thought you knew what you were doing!”

“Yeah, ’cause if I said I didn’t, you would’ve tried to stop it yourself!”

“Maybe I should!  Give me that—”

 _“Do be more cautious!  Wear some_ —by Jove’s beard!”

“Hey, can’t say it was my fault that time.”

“I barely even had a chance, you must have broken something.”

“Fine, I’ll fix it.  Maybe.”

 _“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!_ That’s it, I give up!”

_“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!”_

Vinnie grabbed Balthazar and yanked him away from the closet and the bomb inside of it.  “That time we didn’t even touch it.  You can’t blame us for that!”

“Then why do we keep looping?”

“That’s why we’re over here.  Maybe it won’t hit us if we back off.”

“But how are we supposed to disable it if we can’t even get near it?”

“I dunno, shoot it?”

“We are not firing projectiles with unstable space-time!”

Vinnie scratched his head.  “Maybe it’s not a malfunction,” he realized, but before Balthazar could ask for him to elaborate, a menacing figure loomed in the doorway.

“Maybe it isn’t,” Polychronos sang softly.

 

 

The man was indescribable.  It wasn’t that there was anything unusual about his face.  It was just that the second Balthazar looked away, or blinked, he ceased to recall if the man’s hair was blonde or jet-black, if he wore glasses or not, if he had freckles or fair skin.  But he knew who it was, beyond a doubt.

“What’d you do with Brick and Savannah and the Milos?” Vinnie demanded.

“Their fighting me is futile.  They’re as trapped in battle with me as you are trapped with my device.  Did you really think I wouldn’t expect your interference?”

He strode across the room, picked up the grenade, and rolled it down his arm and across his back the way a person might do with a basketball.  “You’re all tip-toing at the shoreline of an ocean I’ve colonized the bottom of!  You know nothing of the true vastness of the cosmos!  And neither do they!”  He laughed.  “I’ve been forwards in time, backwards in time, sideways in time!  I’ve had billions of years of experience you never will, and I will continue to have trillions more because all time belongs to me now!”

“‘Now’?” Vinnie repeated.  “So then there was a time when you didn’t own time.”

“Vincent!  Do not provoke him!”

“It’s quite all right.  I cannot be provoked, because I cannot be threatened.  It is true that I, too, have an origin, a time when I was young and naïve.  But for me, the origin is a center, not a beginning, and certainly not an end.  So long as I draw my power in the past, present, future, and outside-time, it matters not that there exists, as a tiny speck somewhere in the continuum, a version of me that remains like you.”  Polychronos folded his hands behind his head.  “It’s quite ironic, really.  That version of me sought to stop me before he knew it was me.  Well, as much as an atemporal being such as myself has a ‘before’ at all.  He originated in the break, you know.  During the split in your realities.  I suppose he probably had to,” Polychronos mused.  “And that is why retaining the divide, right at the point in time where it is, is vital.  Did it never puzzle you that the grenade’s impact takes effect prior to its ignition?  That’s how there emerged a divergence prior to you ‘stopping’ it.”

“And just how far back did you peel the fabric of space-time apart?” Vinnie inquired, oddly calm.  He seemed genuinely curious, rather than angry or frightened.  Only Vinnie would care to spend his final moments finding out how the impetus of his death worked.

Balthazar’s stomach flipped.

Was he about to watch Vinnie die all over again?

“Not too far,” Polychronos admitted.  “It’s a shame.  Drawing power from a split timeline becomes far easier the longer the split lasts.  But once the Bureau of Cosmic Manipulation finally learned to fear me, they opted to seal the universe.  The part they could, anyway.”

“Seal the universe?” Balthazar could barely keep up with any part of the conversation.

Polychronos nodded.  “They developed some technology that could bind the fibers of space-time together to stop them from splitting, like the aglet on a shoelace.  But it only works if all the fibers are united to begin with, which, over the course of the next five years, they clearly will not be.  Five years is hardly anything to me by now.  Nevertheless… they are an incredibly valuable source for me.  I can draw from that window the essence of years post and prior.  It’s not much time, but it’s just enough for me to squeeze in.”

“Just enough, eh?” Vinnie said.

He ran up to the grenade, yanked it from Polychronos’ grasp, and ripped it open.

“Balthy, hon, I know which wire we need!”

 

 

_“Do be more cautious!  Wear some gloves, at least!”_

“Really?  This again?”

Except, this time, the words hadn’t been uttered by Balthazar himself.  They seemed to come from somewhere above.

Like it had been before.

Balthazar willed himself to take in his surroundings, and was stunned to find that they were very familiar.  His left hand grasped a long, gray strand.

His right hand grasped Vinnie’s.

“I got us back to the superspacial realm,” Vinnie said smugly, flipping the strand in his other hand like a jump-rope.

“Brilliant, but what is this meant to accomplish?”

“Poly said he needed a five-year window to break into the universe’s energy,” Vinnie explained.  “And we closed that window when we kissed, remember that?”

“Because we bridged the gap.”

“Exactly.  And now we’re going to do exactly the same thing… halfway through.”  Vinnie smiled.  “Let’s see him try to break through two-and-a-half years instead!”

“But how long do we have to hold this for?” Balthazar asked.

“Hard telling.  But… I have a theory.”  Vinnie’s tone become more serious.  “Balthy?  Will you hold this for me?”  He passed his strand over to Balthazar, who managed to clench it in his left hand without letting go of the first one.  “And I’ll hold yours.”  In the hand that had just been freed, Vinnie took Balthazar’s thread.  “Okay.  You trust me?”

“Always,” Balthazar assured him.

“All right,” Vinnie said.

And that was when he let go of Balthazar.

 

 

Again.  Vinnie had just left him, again.

But Balthazar had promised to trust him.

He couldn’t dwell on Vinnie leaving without eroding the trust he had pledged.

So instead, he focused on where he was now.

It was the apartment, but nearly everything was gray now, except for a few miscellaneous shoes, coats, top hats… Balthazar’s things.

He checked the date on the calendar.  Yes, Vinnie had dropped him off at almost exactly the two-and-a-half year mark.  But what was he supposed to do without Vinnie to help him re-bind the universe or whatever?

Balthazar shuddered.  He didn’t like to think of this point in his life, let alone re-live it.  And somehow, this wasn’t how he remembered the apartment looking at that time anyway.  It was significantly messier, and smelled of cheese.

And then there was that sobbing from the other room.

Balthazar’s breath caught.  He knew that sobbing.  He knew that when he cried, he didn’t sound like that.

He ran to the bedroom, almost kicking down the door, and found him.

Vinnie.

This wasn’t the jovial Vinnie who mere moments ago had practically flipped off a god of the space-time continuum.  It certainly wasn’t the confident Vinnie who had asked for Balthazar’s trust in whatever this plan was.

This Vinnie was alone, wearing only a pair of boxers, curled up in a ball on the bed.  On the floor lay a few bottles, an empty bag of cheese puffs, and a photo of Balthazar admonishing Ginger for some sort of rabbit mischief that Balthazar had long since forgotten.

This was Vinnie vulnerable.

“Vincent.  Vincent!” Balthazar called desperately, but it was as though Vinnie hadn’t even heard him.

“Vinnie, I am so, so sorry I left you,” Balthazar said quietly, although why exactly he even bothered, he could not say.  “Vinnie… I never wanted you to be alone.”

He sat down on the bed next to his partner.  “Vinnie, even if you can’t hear me… I want you to know that it will get better.  I promise.”  He exhaled.  “Even if it sure doesn’t look like it now.”

Vinnie twitched.

“I wish you would believe me when I say I’m coming back,” Balthazar said.  “Dash it all, I wish you would believe me that I’m sitting here now.  But I can’t make you.  I just want you to understand that this isn’t the end.”

Vinnie sat up.  Could he hear Balthazar after all?

“But even if it was… even if we really did see the last of each other in that blasted hospital… this still isn’t what I would want.  Vinnie, it was bad enough for you to die in my reality.  Please.  For my sake, can you not do your best to live in this one?”

Vinnie crossed his arms.

“I was angry when I realized we only had ten years together.  I had thought we’d have more.  Much more.  I wished I’d shown more love to you during our time together.  But you’re probably wishing the same thing.”  Balthazar leaned against Vinnie, resting his head on his shoulder.  “And the truth of the matter is, for all of our bickering, I did feel loved.  I do feel loved.  I know you loved me.  I suppose… I suppose then somewhere you have to know how much I’ve loved you.  Keep that love.  Even if fate takes us away from each other again, even if it’s the day after I go back to the future and you get hit by that proverbial bus, I’ll know that our love holds on.”  He smiled wryly.  “It holds on tightly enough to bind the universe together.”

Vinnie wiped a tear from his eye.  He leaned over the edge of the bed and inspected a cheese puff that had escaped him.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, don’t tell me you’re about to eat that.  It’s been on the ground!”

“Aha!”  Vinnie turned back and looked Balthazar square in the eye.  “It really is you, isn’t it.  A hallucination couldn’t make up that tone.  Not in a million years.”

“If that’s what it takes then for you to believe me, very well.”

“So how long are you going to stay?”

The question cut Balthazar right in the gut.  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I wish I could stay forever.  But Vinnie and I… future Vinnie, I mean… we’ve got a world to save.”

Vinnie nodded.  “That’s… that’s fair,” he admitted painfully.  “Just you being here, however long… that saves my world.”

Balthazar held Vinnie tightly as they kissed.

 

 

For just a moment, Balthazar didn’t remember where he’d been.

It had been one of the bad days, the days when Vinnie’s death hit him extra-hard.  He had been alone in the dark, clutching a blanket around himself, wishing old wishes.

And then Vinnie had appeared.

And talked to him.

And they had kissed, and—

Balthazar remembered exactly where he’d been.

And from the look on Vinnie’s face, he did as well.

“I think it worked,” Vinnie said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Look around you.”

Balthazar did, and saw that the room was, once again, for however brief of a moment, washed in color.  His universe.  Vinnie’s universe.  They were one again, for however long this would last.

“I don’t know if it’s enough to stop Polychronos,” Vinnie admitted.

“It already has been.”

A portal opened up underneath them and sucked them in.

 

 

They were back in the ship.

“So Polychronos just… stopped?” Vinnie asked the others incredulously.

Milo-the-First nodded.  “He said he was going back to get some more juice, and right as he said that, he froze.  And then he fell apart.”

“But not before saying something about being blocked,” Sixth added.  “Whatever you guys did, it cut off his energy supply.”

“We closed his window to our universe,” Vinnie said.  “So now whatever else happens, he can’t mess with our timeline anymore.”

“Oh, there’s more to it than that!” Milo-the-First exclaimed.  “You stopped him for good!”

“How do you mean?” asked Balthazar.

“What he means is, the universes that were formerly depleted have been… restored.  The ones that were frayed have been woven back together.  At least, the ones that we’ve checked on,” Savannah explained.

“It appears that no matter how many universes he tapped, he was powerless if he couldn’t get to his own,” Sixth added.  “So all that past, present, and future stuff couldn’t happen.”

“But the fork in our own universe stayed.”

“Yeah, don’t ask me to explain that one.  But it’s stable, promise,” Sixth told Vinnie and Balthazar.

“You did good,” Savannah said, a small but genuine smile crossing her face.  “Didn’t they?” she taunted Brick.

“Yeah, yeah,” he admitted.  “They’re still not invited to the BCM, though.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Vinnie said.  “This way we get to stay in the past and go to Lard World and eat breakfast burritos!”

Savannah rolled her eyes.  “Suit yourselves, lovebirds.”

“Speaking of the past, are we free to return?” Balthazar asked.

Sixth nodded.  “Quite.  In fact… I sort of need you to.”

 

 

“No wait, so tell me again,” Zack begged Milo-the-First.  “I think I might get it this time.  So Polychronos went back in time, killed Dakota, then went back and killed Cavendish instead…”

“It’s gonna take a lot of explaining to get that story straight,” Melissa chuckled.  “Time travel was hard enough.”

They were sitting once more in the Murphys’ rec room.  Making good on Vinnie’s promise, they had arrived in time to watch the kids open their presents, which they now eagerly played with as they sprawled out on the floor.

Balthazar clasped Vinnie’s hand in his.  “Believe us, we’ve no intent to venture down that rabbit hole again any time soon.”

“It’s kind of a hard life,” Sixth confessed as he accepted a mug of hot chocolate from Uheri.  “Brick and Savannah always end up fighting after a day’s work.”

“Eh, they’ve always been like that.”  Vinnie shrugged.

“Speaking of, did they just leave you here?” Gretchen asked.

“Yeah, but I’ve got a different ride home,” Sixth said simply.

“You have your own time vehicle?” Balthazar asked.

“Of sorts.”  Sixth poked a marshmallow on top of his cocoa.  “It’s… time I told you the whole truth.  Saving the world was great and all, but that’s not the only reason I put you two back together.  I had some… shall I say, vested interests.”

“What kinda vested interests?” Vinnie inquired.

A portal opened again in the ceiling and a tall, curvy woman with beige skin dropped down.

“Roberta!” Sixth exclaimed.  “Glad you could make it!”

“Ditto,” she said, wrapping her arms around him.

“Everyone, this is Roberta,” Sixth introduced.  “My fiancée.  But you two…”  He turned to Vinnie and Balthazar.  “Well, you’ll know her better as your great-great granddaughter.”

Balthazar almost choked on the cookie he had at the back of his mouth.  He and Vinnie hadn’t even really discussed becoming parents, let alone started the paperwork to adopt a child.

Then again…

He examined the girl in front of him.  She had long, flowing brown hair, hair very much like that which he liked to twirl in his fingers when his partner was asleep.  But she also had bright blue eyes, eyes that looked very familiar to Balthazar from both family photographs and looking in the mirror.  Despite a few generations’ dilution, it was clear what gene pool she had drawn from.

And Balthazar wasn’t the only one who noticed, either.

“Hold up… you guys have a kid?  Like, together?” Zack had turned a little pale.

“Well, not yet, obviously!”

“But you’re both…”

“Really, Zack?”  Melissa shook her head.  “These guys just reinforced a fractured universe and defeated a threat to the very fabric of the entirety of existence… using nothing more than the Power of Love… and you think they won’t figure something out?”

“Your dealings with cosmic manipulations may be over,” Sixth said.  “But believe me, you’ve got a long time to go still in the married life!”  He kissed Roberta’s cheek.  “I might be back later to ask for some pointers…”

“How many years?”  Balthazar felt a little guilty for asking, but he was more curious than anything.

“Suffice it to say, a lot,” Roberta answered.

Vinnie leaned into Balthazar and sighed contentedly.

“Very well,” Balthazar told her.  “Bring them on.”


End file.
